it later – to somehow dilute it for a short time longer – until- until -
Until when?
Recognition that he is yet again trying to fight with conscious will – with precisely what had propelled him to this perilous impasse – brings him up short.
Isn’t excessive mental control the source of his danger?
How, with the stakes so high, can he quarantine feeling yet again?
Perceiving one escape route to be denied, he reaches for another in the form of more questions. Why can’t the unalloyed pleasure of his time with Maja console, at least to some extent, for the pain of having lost her? And why, for him, should retrospective pain be so much stronger than recollected happiness?
3. Milos
One of hundreds of hastily conscripted `soldiers’, he stands in line like everyone else.
Perhaps because of the unwelcome opportunity it affords for thinking, being stationary is somehow the most taxing task of all. Provided it isn’t civilians you are attacking, not even fighting is as difficult.
But then perhaps he is no longer capable of thought. Maybe the random, disjointed images which assail him in these line-ups are the residue of immediate experience, like the twitching of a dismembered corpse. For his self has surely been extinguished in one of the many battles in which he has been forced to participate.
No, `forced’ is the wrong word.
After a surprisingly short period of time, which means his moral sensibilities must have eroded significantly, no degree of force had been necessary. Devoid of all feeling and agency, he is like a sleep-walker.
`Battle’ seems the wrong word too. It seems to dignify with some kind of plan or purpose what is totally senseless and shambolic.
But no, that’s not right either.
Because systematic ruthlessness is never haphazard.
As a child, he had read about battles. About the often heroic stature of the men who fought them. What he is engaged in bears no resemblance to those. And there are now no heroes.
Perhaps not even men.
Sometimes at night he is woken by the stifled moans of those around him. Initially he had seized on these spontaneous eruptions of suffering. Had seen in them confirmation, as well as consolation, that neither he nor his comrades had entirely abrogated human status. But with the first rays of dawn and return to consciousness, there is no acknowledgment of these nocturnal emissions, no meeting of eyes. It is as if anguish over the infliction of pain is indeed as pointless and irrelevant as guilt over masturbation.
Yes, we have ceased to be men.
Yet we are not all the same either. Perhaps there is comfort to be found in that. Notwithstanding the internalised censorship of emotion, he can detect those for whom, like himself, the carnage is unpalatable rather than a source of gratification. Despite the range of possibilities in between, it seems the division of response amounts, in the end, to this.
He calculates that two thirds of his compatriots experience at least no enthusiasm for what they are doing. The remaining third seem to relish it.
And we all know who each other is.
Confirmation of which side of the dichotomy to which a fellow soldier adheres is sometimes slow in coming, sometimes swift like a blade. But is always accompanied by a sense of danger as well as revelation. Knowledge of the other – as of the other in oneself – is itself hazardous.
The greatest revelation and source of danger is the extent to which those in authority welcome and subtly reward (are they capable of subtlety?) those conscripts who are enthusiastic in execution of their `duty’. Not too enthusiastic of course. For all sorts of reasons, too overt a passion for destruction is not to be encouraged. At least when it is undisciplined.
But those who can be `counted on’ always receive extra approbation and rations. Those like himself, who are merely quietly compliant, receive no such rewards. He marvels now that he could ever have been surprised by this.
From where had these `superiors’ come?
From what walks of life; what covert genetic strain? He is struck again by the inappropriateness of ordinary language. And of how the war has starkly exposed anomalies unremarkable in civilian life. Because other than in their capacity to organise terror (a feat in itself under altered criteria) in what ways are such men superior?
And yet, given the inversions and reversals the war is precipitating, perhaps that indeed qualifies as superiority. Perhaps it is those who abjure human standards who most qualify for the term.
There is one `officer’, in particular, whose taste for orchestrated terror is almost refined. Milos can imagine him late in the evenings; sipping schnapps like Nazis of an earlier period (we have our own varieties; it is all being revived). Listening to classical music while savouring the carnage of the day. And anticipating it on the morrow.
Wasn’t Milosevic a former student of law? Karadzic a psychiatrist?
The nexus between education and depravity is tight as a noose. He is glad his parents died of natural causes before the ascendancy of those two.
And before his own shameful complicity in the madness they are fuelling. He doesn’t need to question from what walks of life the instruments of barbarity derive.
They are plumbers, chemists, dentists and shopkeepers.
They are lorry drivers and street vendors, garbage collectors and council officials.
They are like himself. They are himself.
Look what we have become.
4. Lena
22 October 1994 Dear Sasha,
It’s strange how the war condenses everything, refracts it all from a single angle. And how previous plans and priorities seem so trivial when energy is focused on survival.
I can’t believe that as little as a year ago I confidently envisaged a future. That any kind of life beyond the moment was foreseeable.
You will want to know how I am coping. The answer is `not very well’. But qualification, like shades of grey, is inapplicable now. You either cope or you don’t.
Besides, I don’t want to talk about it. Apart from my journal, writing to you is my sole source of solace and escape. I want to talk about anything but myself, and the mad desecration of this country.
Did I say `country?’ That is another exploded category. Nothing means anything anymore. And notice I didn’t say `our’ country. I don’t know this place now. Which means I must never have known it, that all was an illusion.
Could we ever have imagined from the kind of society in which we grew up that ethnic affiliation could literally mean
