Under Pressure. Faruk Šehić

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      Roasted rye coffee is a mark a kilo.

      A bottle of reeky rakia is 10 marks.

      Ćevapi are a luxury anyway.

      Maize bread is tasty and cheap.

      We’re still surrounded from all sides.

      * * *

      At six in the morning my mother plucked dewy pigweed in the nearby dales.

      She brought the harvest home in her raised apron.

      For dinner we had blanched pigweed with garlic, pigweed soup and pigweed salad.

      I’m full of iron.

      As strong as Popeye the Sailor.

      * * *

      I loll about on a grey humanitarian aid sponge mattress.

      Ants are marching up the wall in wide columns.

      I’m popping 10-milligram diazepams.

      Sleeping twenty hours at a time.

      In my room I practise walking with crutches.

      My wounded foot still hurts.

      I’m reading T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

      In the guest room Greta and Nađa are playing solitaire.

      Mum is fiddling about with our wood-burning stove.

      Dad is away on the frontline.

      Behind our refugee house Mum planted onions, peppers, tomatoes.

      We’re waiting for the garden to produce produce.

      In front of our doorstep, Humpy Horsie is happily barking.

      The sun is at its zenith.

      * * *

      From the last dugout to the left they wired us that Osman Jakušović had been KIA.

      A sniper hit him in the forehead, by the hairline.

      It was impossible to reach the farthest dugout on Padež hill.

      That night they brought him down on a stretcher.

      He woke up from cardiac arrest.

      He mumbled netherwords.

      Our hair stood on end as we listened to the dead man talking.

      They took him to the rear.

      He died in hospital after three days.

      I never got to know him well.

      I don’t remember his face.

      He was a tall, muscular lad from the village of Stijena.

      * * *

      10 May 1992 (Friday)

      Nothing has happened to me today.

      * * *

      The machinegun barks like a dog.

      I’ve plucked a shirtful of cherries.

      Bullets whizz above incandescent roofs.

      They say a sniper’s been at it from the Old Citadel.

      Here and there, 60 and 82 mm mortars operate.

      From time to time a tank shoots a shell.

      A rocket launcher lets out a volley.

      I shudder if something explodes nearby.

      Shudders creep up the spine.

      Palms sweat.

      I’m talking about normal things.

      Like clouds, cherries or the river Una.

      * * *

      I have decided to write sparsely.

      End of war not in sight.

      Mon. – drunk.

      Tue. – drunk.

      Wed. – ditto.

      Thu. – 0.

      To Eternity

      1.

      The plan was quite simple: We would stretch out and form a firing line. The nine of us. The distance between each two fighters 5–10 metres. Frontal assault from the Standard Operating Procedures. Baldie will fire a rocket from his shoulder-fired Yugoslav Army Zolja launcher. That’s our artillery prep. We will rise up from the grass. Start shooting and shouting the Takbir as we dash for their trenches. Whoever survives, survives.

      Now we lie about and smoke in the safety of our own trenches. We’re wearing our helmets, and our ammunition vests are stocked with thirty-round magazines. Baldie is slinging his Zolja over his back. Our mighty artillery. Faćo is the only one of us who has a rifle with a wooden stock. He says it’s his lucky rifle. The trenchies are offering us cigarettes and coffee, eyes ablink with happiness because they’re not participating in the operation. Everything for the commandos. Small talk, nobody mentions what is to come. As if we were going on a picnic, not a trench raid.

      October wind musters out veteran beech and hornbeam leaves. As they fall, they brush leaf against leaf, rustling like Indian silk. The pines are indestructible. Their dark green needles comb the wind. We wait for the battalion commander to give the off via a Motorola. Night is in force. We’re in the forest, where our strange firing line in the shape of a horseshoe is formed. Below the forest runs an asphalt road. Further down is a great big hollow, as dark as King Kong’s gullet. Three hundred metres across the hollow our line continues. So we’re bulging into their line. An un-fuck-with-able salient exposed to guns of all calibres.

      Baldie motions us to move. Hafura and I go on a recce, just in case, although midnight blue is the colour-in-chief. We head out of the forest. We walk like camouflaged ghosts, and sneak up to a stretch of stunted undergrowth. If somebody opens up on us, we’re fucked because we’re between the lines. We can only move by ear. We hear indistinct human speech. We hold our breath. Some kind of tapping sound is coming from their trenches. Dull thuds. As if they’re digging in. Now? What the fuck? Baldie approaches with the rest of the detail. We take up positions as planned and start to crawl. Golo brdo. Has there ever been a stupider name for a hump than Barren Hill? We close up to the spot. We can’t see their trenches. It seems they are just below the brow of the fell, on the last slope. Baldie gets up, telescopes the Zolja out. He takes aim, eyeballs it. The rocket flies above the hill and on to Zanzibar. He must’ve hit a barn or some such strategically significant facility. Doesn’t matter, it’s just a psychological trick anyway. Explosions stoke fear, and fear makes you see СКАЧАТЬ