Under Pressure. Faruk Šehić

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СКАЧАТЬ the park, by the primary school, we’re smoking the weed, washing it down with rot-gut. Dusk rises like dark dough. The stars are twinkly flakes of bran. The dark matter is made of rye. Above the school entrance there is a placard: Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina – the guarantor of your survival. In the deep grass, humanoid statues are randomly arranged for display. All that culture is suffocating. It’s like peacetime.

      Mama statue is holding a baby in her arms. Baby statue sleeps on the mighty tits that are green with mould. Its head is the size of a football. The weed and the rakia make the world twice as good. They bombard the brain with cluster bombs of rapture. The statues grow turquoise wings and soar to the sky like Wenders’s angels. My legs are full of lead. Miki is moving stars with his gaze. He’s really good at it. He’s rearranging the constellations. We sink into the dumps as if into a black hole. There’s also the reeds, when you snap like one.

      ‘Did ya see me bring that star down?’

      ‘Fuck it, let it suffer,’ I say to Miki. ‘Rock ’n Roll all night!’

      ‘Fuck a fighter that ’asn’t been wounded. ’old on a sec, mate, am I right or wot?’ Miki slams his fist on the ground, fixing my gaze, his eyes agoggle.

      ‘Right as pie,’ I reassure him. ‘The dumps and the reeds – brothers.’

      Miki sheds tears the size of white small-grain beans. We share the last fag. The rot-gut is as sweet as kiwi juice, and there’s still some left. Puff, puff me, puff, puff Miki, right down to the filter. There’s always things that piss on your parade. Why not make half-metre fags? You smoke till you become tired, flick the ember off, take a little break then light up again. Absolute bliss: death by smoking. You’re going to get killed anyway, lung cancer or no lung cancer, who gives half a fuck?

      ‘I’m off to take a piss,’ says Miki. ‘Alcohol and weed/making spirits bright/what fun it is to drink and smoke/and piss whilst high as a kite,’ he sings.

      ‘Take one for me, too. And see that ya don’t step on a mine!’ I shout after him.

      His gigantic shadow lags behind his body and turns the corner of the schoolhouse. A cuckoo is calling in code understood only by madmen. The rhythm of his elegy is akin to the tick-tocking of a clockwork bomb. Above the park is a road on which cars seldom travel. Their lights illuminate the schoolhouse windows and façade like searchlights in a concentration camp. We’re on leave for two more days, it’s as though we had two gold ingots in our hands. Nothing else matters: news from the front, or whether or not there’s going to be any food and ammunition. The weed and the rakia make the world twice as good. And the future, that syphilitic whore, promises riotous revelries.

      The street lamps are out of order. I can’t think of a reason why they should work anyway, it’s more intimate like this. Only the priority facilities have electricity. And the homes of priority citizens. The darkness swallows us. Chews us up as we dream. It chucks us back up in the morning. Hung-over like wraiths, we set out in pursuit of a refreshing drop of alcohol, fantasising about a dewy pint bottle of Karlovačko beer.

      3.

      On 20 March 1994, a combined arms artillery/infantry attack commences at 09:50. Dugout 1 has eight wounded. On Hasin Vrh tasty ramsons grows. It tastes like garlic. It lowers the blood pressure. Ramsons is medicinal, it slows down ageing. It makes for excellent salad to accompany a plate of bean stew. On Hasin Vrh, dugouts are made of rocks. They aren’t even proper dugouts, more like sangars with very thin roofs. Makeshift weekend cottages for meditation in conditions of imminent danger to life and health. For nature lovers: clean mountain air, organically grown food. UNHCR’s reinforced plastic sheeting offering protection from the rain. It filters sunshine, removes the dangerous ultra-violet spectrum. Everything is the result of improvisation. The sky is improvised. Weapon systems, trees, rocks, insects and beasts, too. Around seven dead and thirty-five wounded is another product of improvisation. Only one dale has been lost. In it grows magically scrumptious ramsons. Shells, let off from mortars, whistle through the air like fatwas.

      Amir carries me down the country road. I’m wounded in the left foot. In front of us a rifle grenade lands near a group towing a fighter wounded in the spine. His legs drag lifelessly behind him as if they weren’t his. We dive onto the forest floor from the road. Fifty metres to the left of us their battle cries ring out. Our line cracked like a china vase. Gone up the devil’s mother’s fanny. In my Kalashnikov I’ve got some five or six rounds. Enough to blow my brains out and end the war forever.

      Forcing the River

      ‘We’re all gonna get killed here, down to the last man,’ says Zica.

      Rotting pears squish under our boots. In the fruit, sugar turns into alcohol. I’ve never got drunk on a dry line. The crown of the pear tree, like an old lady, leans over the narrow ginnel we’re traversing at double time. The magazines in my tactical vest bounce like Rambo’s breasts when he jogs. In daytime this street is covered by an eight-four. It’s always safer at night. That’s why we’re fuckin’ running. We are in enfilade along the length of the alley, some fifty metres. The feeling is so intense you can’t think, you just rush headlong like a wildebeest.

      We are sitting ducks until we reach the sheltering lee of the next house. Once there, we light up, gasping for breath. The wind brings the echoes of gunfire from the canyon, expanding bullets pop as if in a chain reaction. A torn curtain is hanging through the broken window. The TV shelf is covered in dust. The house has been looted. Home appliances fetch good prices. In the rear, a TV set is worth 100–200 marks, depending on the make. Those with flat screens are the best. Trinitrons. Like some kind of aliens from Star Trek.

      Žile is fascinated by Trinitrons. Because the word sounds good. I guess. One time Juso Longcock and I commandeered an electric motor from a construction company. We wrapped it up in a humanitarian aid blanket and dragged it for almost twenty kilometres to the village of Gnjilavac. Juso sold it there and went to the nearby town of Kladuša with the money. There are people who like to steal bars of soap, chainsaws, transformer oil from substations, or designer furniture. Others look for gold or hard currency. Žile has a penchant for coffee. Paški for Levi’s 501 jeans. Bijeli loves glasses and cutlery. He was a waiter before the war.

      I’m lying. On one operation against the Autonomists I stole an Ambas­sador blanket, still in the original packaging. On the next opera­tion, after I’d taken a pocket watch off an elderly corpse, with a relief of a capercaillie on the lid, I was wounded in the left foot. A piece of shrapnel the size of a marble crushed the first metatarsus, which is attached to the big toe, and lodged itself somewhere in the fleshy part. The pain was unbearable the following few days. I’d bang my fist on the wall, the nurse would come and hit me with a shot of morphine. For the next six hours I’d be in a state of bliss. Next to my bed lay a fighter with a high amputation. He was wont to sing some knicker-dropping turbo-folk number whilst the nurse dressed his wound. From time to time he would complain of phantom pain and an itch in the toes he no longer had. His leg had been cut off above the knee. I screamed when the nurse stuck her tweezers into my wound. She twisted them clockwise, as if to tighten down a bolt. At times I was too embarrassed to scream in front of the amputee, so I’d refrain from complaining about my own pain. The nurse would douse my wound with hydrogen peroxide which ate away the rot and the dead tissue. It foamed like Schweppes. A scab slowly formed on the surface, and the pain subsided. Ever since, the piece of shrapnel in my left foot has forecasted the weather as accurately as any weatherman.

      I spent four months walking on crutches, like a run-of-the-mill wounded soldier. Soon the rubber tip on the right crutch wore down, and the crutch made a distinct sound. My dog would recognise the sound of me from a hundred metres away. I called him Humpy Horsie, because he’d started ambling after he СКАЧАТЬ