Under Pressure. Faruk Šehić

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СКАЧАТЬ wouldn’t be luggin’ it to battle if it didn’t, would I now?’

      ‘Find us some music, so we don’t ’ear when a shell drops on us.’

      Pađen turns the radio on. He twists the plastic knob. Goes through stations playing classical music: Bach, Beethoven, Rach­maninov. Piano, organ, violins, bassoons and clarinets drive me schizo. Horror has an agent in every cell of my body.

      ‘Fuck off with that jangle!’ I shout to Pađen.

      The plastic dial moves on. Bowie’s Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide brings me to tears. I can see before my eyes a massive bar of solid wood. And a pint of foamy beer. A fluorescent lamp swaying above the bar, creating a sense of hovering. Everything is slowed down. Her greenish eyes sparkle, her lips swell pinkly before the kiss. I look at her face as we’re kissing. It becomes deformed with beauty. Give me your hand…, Bowie sings. The flashback to peacetime is cut short like when the film snaps in the middle of the screening. The dial travels on. The search for salvation is a soap bubble. Radio Korenica is playing a song with the following lyrics:

      Dvor na Uni, Dvor na Uni, quaint little church upon a hill

      That’s the place where, that’s the place where Serbs are breeding still…

      The song is ideal for both laughter and tears. But shells are still dropping, stretching the mind. Now and again we are reduced to a state of feeble-mindedness. The belts connecting the drive wheels in our heads keep falling off. The clatter of the tanks a kilometre ahead is the most unnerving sound on earth. It’ll be the same thing again: squeeze your anus tight, shrink your brain to the size of a marble. We are lovely, innocent vowels spat out from the Devil’s mouth. Carry out the orders with the precision of a guided rocket. Act by inertia like a stray bullet. Be part of a stained glass window where the dominant colour is that of human mince. Hail to the homeland! Eyes right! The thud of the marching step. Ironed flags fluttering. Polished pips on the epaulettes gleaming. Hearts tick-tocking like clockworks.

      ‘Something’s well dodgy. They should’ve relieved us yonks

      ago. Maybe they’ve pulled back and just left us ’ere?’ Pađen thinks out loud.

      ‘I suggest we slowly slope off. No point anyway…’

      ‘Fuck the point! And fuck whoever invented it.’

      ‘So, where do we go now?’

      ‘No idea.’

      ‘Crawl up our mums’ fannies.’

      ‘Best place to be.’

      ‘What if they’ve counterattacked?’

      ‘Then we’re fucked.’

      * * *

      Baldie takes down the muster roll. Troop strength: nine men plus pen-pusher. Absent: one at barracks (pen-pusher). Wounded: two fighters. Dead: one. On med leave: one in psych ward (recruit). At muster: five fighters.

      We drink rakia and smoke in silence. Outside, fog captures acres of territory. Statistics reigns supreme. With great confidence it handles surplus and shortage. It measures morale, weighs men like heads of cattle. Standard deviation, plus/minus infinity.

      Now We Get a-Rude and a-Reckless

      1.

      We’re digging up an Autonomist. Our razor-sharp shovels slice through the sloshy snow and stick into the makeshift mound. The soil is sodden sludge. The sound of metal stabbing the loamy clay breaks the winter silence. Around us, stunted spruces, dishevelled like Gremlins. They are slowly stripping off their overwhites as the snow thaws and falls to the ground with a thud. A southerly blows, but it’s still cold. The hands dry and crack, the fingers tingle. A magpie, in his black and white kit, zig-zags overhead. We lean onto the shovels to get the unpleasant business over with. Half of the mound is gone, and the rest looks like a scab torn up by a surgeon’s tweezers. Now and again, Beardo looks skywards, gets momentarily lost in thought, and then continues to dig. As if to apologise to the heavens for what he’s doing.

      ‘It’s all the same to ’im now, nothin’ bothers him anymore,’ mumbles Beardo.

      ‘’E’s not even a ’uman bein’ anymore. Just a corpse,’ I add. ‘Just some body, arms, legs, neutralised in accordance with the SOPs.’

      The SOPs contain an explanation for everything under the sun in both war and peacetime. The definitions are clear, concise and precise, as if written by mediaeval scribes destitute of all inspiration. Ready! Aim! Fire! Eliminate enemy personnel with three short bursts. Reload! Discharge! Heel! Fetch! Dive to the right! The assault rifle is effective up to 400 metres, in case of co-ordinated fire by two or more firers up to 800… The SOPs are the finest encyclopaedia of the insanity of pedantry, SCH in tactical boots.

      ‘Ain’t easy bein’ alive, going about in the world in this body,’ laments Beardo.

      A week ago, last time we were on duty, we buried the corpse where it lay. A bullet had ripped up the tendons on his right wrist. They poked out like severed power cords. Another bullet, the one which killed him, hit him below the left breast, near the heart. The blood was partially encrusted there, gelatinous. Above the entry wound, on his camo vest, hung a hunter’s pin badge, silver-coloured, slightly rusty. On the pin were two doubles, a hunter’s hat and an oak twig.

      He lay on his back when we found him. Birds had eaten his eyes and the soft parts of his nose and ears. His eyelashes looked monstrous, trimming two empty eye sockets like sunflower petals bordering the pistil. His neck, swollen with decay, was locked by the collar of a camo shirt. I took the vest off him, in spite of the soldiers’ superstition that says never to take anything off the dead. He was thickset, with short, Teutonic-blond hair. About twenty-two. A sturdy village lad. The cold had conserved him, stopped further decomposition. Soon he was in his underwear and boots. After that we buried him. Nothing is more real than the human body when it starts to reek.

      At home, Mum soaked the vest in cold water, to wash off the blood. The water took on the colour of rotting cherry with streaks of clay, the tub was a brimming blood bath. I left the pin in the drawer as a memento. I wasn’t thinking about soldier’s superstitions. Everything was happening to me for the first time.

      Mum washed and darned the vest. I put it on like a proper frontline fop and went back on duty. Sometimes you think you’re invisible in camo, and therefore also indestructible. The better the camouflage pattern, the more invisible you are, and the longer you’ll live.

      After ten minutes of vigorous digging we struck the corpse. We didn’t see any maggots, the soil was too hard and cold for them to do their thing. Only the bacteria of decay were patient and relentless. We wrapped him in a shelter-half and took him to the line. It was one of those specious ceasefires during which a sniper could easily send you to the happy hunting ground.

      Between the lines, in a barn full of rotting hay, we met with the Autonomists. We rolled the corpse in on a wheelbarrow. They brought two sacks of flour, ten litres of cooking oil and a sack of sugar. A small fortune. We transacted the exchange, smoked a fag, shared a few words and went our separate ways. In war, when barter is practised, even a dead man has a price.

      2.

      Miki procured a matchbox of weed. We scrounged together a tenner. Bought a bottle of rot-gut. Some call this rakia powderpiss, because there’s a story going СКАЧАТЬ