The Skinner's Revenge. Chris Karsten

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СКАЧАТЬ next to his father. His body was still warm, as if he was just sleeping.

      For a long time Milo lay by his father’s side. The bullets thudding into the sandbags were dim sounds from another time, another world.

      Then it was quiet, and the silence wrenched him from his stupor. He pushed himself up on his arm and peered over the sandbags at the building. He sat cross-legged as he folded the arms of his father’s spectacles and put them into his jacket pocket. Then he reached for the white handkerchief and wiped the blood from his father’s forehead and hair.

      Milo turned his face to the west. In the last light of the setting sun the mountains of Bjelašnica and Igman were deep in shadow. The hazy sky was changing colour, like blood poured into water.

      He stretched his legs and lay back down. Placing his hand on his father’s cheek, he felt the beard stubble against his palm. He didn’t close his eyes, but lay watching as the light faded and the sky over the bridge and city became darker.

      While Milo was waiting for the night, a seed germinated amid the chaos in his mind. His mother had been right, he thought: no one could be trusted. In the dirty street, on the bridge where his father’s blood was congealing in the sand and dust, he knew that everything had changed. Henceforth their lives would be irrevocably different: his own, and the lives of his mother and his sister Kaya, who was only nine years old.

      Once there had been seven of them in the poky apartment in Strossmayer but, like every other family in Sarajevo, their numbers had diminished. His grandpa had been mowed down in the water queue, his grandma in the bread queue. But worst, until today, had been Jasmina in the last snow before summer, on the slopes of the Jahorina mountain, the site of the women’s skiing events during the 1984 Winter Olympics. His mother had grown quiet after Jasmina’s death. His father too. Everyone had become quieter. There was no more laughter in their apartment.

      He didn’t know how long he had lain there. When he opened his eyes, night had fallen over Sarajevo. Against his hand, his father’s cheek was cold.

      Milo sat up slowly. Here and there, far apart, streetlights were still burning. He grunted softly as he tipped the first sandbag from the cart, more loudly with the second one. His father, like everyone else, was emaciated, but Milo still struggled to get him onto the cart, on his back with his legs dangling down the back. Grasping the handle, Milo took one last look at the now dark and sinister shape of the building from which the shots had been fired. Then he dragged the cart with his father’s body off the bridge, around the sharp corner with its protecting wall, sandbags and warning signs, to the embankment and back along the river to the old town.

      In Baščaršija, in an alley behind the Sebilj fountain, now dry, lived Dr Buzuk. Dr Buzuk would know what to do. He would help lift his father off the cart and carry him inside. Dr Buzuk would take care of his father and when that had been done, Milo would walk to Strossmayer, where his mother would be anxiously waiting. She and Kaya.

      He thought of the fear on his mother’s thin face as he pulled the cart carrying his father’s body over the cobblestones, past the cathedral square, along Ferhadija, into the old town. His head lowered, he was unaware of the mute faces behind the lace curtains at the windows. Everyone knew Milo and his water cart; they had all known Tomislav Borić.

      * * *

      “You can wait here, Milo. Would you like some tea?”

      Milo shook his head. Dr Buzuk had examined his father and summoned the hearse from the Kuševo Hospital over the citizens’ band radio.

      “I’ll take the message to your mother.”

      Milo shook his head again. “I will. I’ll tell her myself.”

      “I’ll go with you.”

      “No.”

      “Wait until I’ve finished.”

      “No.”

      “Well, take these two sleeping tablets. It will be a great shock to her.”

      “She’s expecting it.”

      “Give her the pills. See that she takes one tonight. Do you want one as well?”

      “No.”

      “Cry, Milo. It’s the only thing that helps. You must cry. Don’t keep it bottled inside.”

      “I have to be strong for my mother. And my sister.”

      “I’ll come to the apartment as soon as they’ve fetched your father. Wait there for me. Tell your mother I’m on my way.”

      Milo walked out into the night. He pulled his empty cart through the narrow alleys, wondering how he was going to break it to his mother that his father wasn’t coming back, that she’d been right: not even a book of Serbian poems could fend off Serbian bullets.

      But she’d know that immediately, he thought. She’d see it in his face, in the tears on his cheeks, the trembling of his body. His mother had expected it, and when he opened the door, she’d know she’d been right.

       5. Present: Bujumbura, Burundi

      The patient sat motionless, as if he had no vital signs. He hated strangers touching him. He especially detested fingers prodding his face. His face was sacred to him – more private than any other part of his body.

      Without realising it, he was holding his breath as he endured the doctor’s fingertips. The doctor was the first person ever to touch his face. Not even his mother had done so, as far as he could remember.

      It was only when the doctor leant back in his chair – so close their knees were touching – that he exhaled softly. The patient’s lazy eye blinked, like the recalcitrant shutter of an old camera. The eye had its own rhythm, out of sync with its partner. There was no remedy for it.

      “The deterioration of the eye’s elevator and orbicular muscles is a congenital defect,” said the doctor. “It’s not ptosis, which could have been surgically rectified.”

      The patient already knew that. He’d been ten when the diagnosis was made. He’d learnt to accept the condition, rather than risk losing his eyesight. That would be worse: a lazy eye was better than a blind one.

      “Wear spectacles with dark lenses,” the doctor suggested. “If you’re embarrassed by the eye, get coloured lenses. Amber, mauve or blue, even yellow. Any colour you like. It’s foonky.”

      The patient had to concentrate hard to follow the doctor’s conversation. Dr Lippens spoke English with an accent. His hard Germanic g’s and r’s were not unlike the language to which the patient’s ear was accustomed. But the oo was strange.

      “You mean ‘funky’?”

      “That’s what I said: foonky.”

      Funky yellow spectacles rang a bell with the patient. He’d once tenderly removed СКАЧАТЬ