The loud blast sounded like a final explanation; it made the lights go out, restoring to the world the peace and tranquillity that was behind his closed eyes. The young man stood on top of the house, on the edge of its flat roof, swaying gently in the wind. That morning, unfamiliar voices from the lake had brought news of his father’s death. But how reliable was the information? Of course he couldn’t be sure, not when all the phones were down. In any case, reliable messengers only entered Sarajevo by accident.
There was nothing he could see (or hear) from his gloomy vantage point to confirm (or deny) the existence of the ugly voice that had been audible for only a second or two. He had been standing there since the lights went out across the city and now he couldn’t think what to do next. One false move, like going back to bed or playing the cool guy, would only upset him even more. Shaking in the night wind, he gave in to his fear of the coming madness, hating nostalgia and the crystal lake.
He was seven years old when he first held a live trout in his hands. He couldn’t help thinking that the fish, cruelly separated from the water and thrashing its tail angrily, wriggling helplessly, was almost as big as he was. He felt there had to be something else, a reason to throw the fish back into the lake, and as far away from him as possible, before the creature had no option but to use a secret weapon — its spikes perhaps, the ones his father said it didn’t have — and to fill him with a dreadful pain in order to get away. Growing up, the boy sometimes watched films in which these aquatic beings managed to escape from the grasp not only of children but also of experienced anglers, just at the point when the fishermen were beginning to congratulate themselves on vanquishing the trout. He had come across the widespread belief that fish were slippery for a reason — and that reason was the constant need for a last-minute escape — but he no longer believed this old-wives’ tale. It was more likely, he reckoned, that the unfortunate fishermen who let the trout slip through their hands were frightened of its dark and watery strength, knowing it could trick and destroy ordinary mortals right now or in a hundred years.
The father used to go fishing at the weekend. The rest of the time he was a miner who worked at the colliery next to the lake. The pit was as muddy and dirty as every other mine in the world, but his father was proud of his job. Being tall, handsome and blond, he spoke up at parents’ meetings on behalf of all the other fathers, and whenever they travelled anywhere by train he would tell his fellow passengers in the carriage that he was a miner. On such occasions the boy would often feel embarrassed and prod his father with his foot, but his father just laughed as if the boy had cracked a good joke. Many years later in some Balkan hotel, the young man tricked a naïve and vulnerable girl, by means of a series of flirtatious glances, into believing that he too was a miner. The girl looked at him and observed cautiously that only uneducated people go to work under ground. The young man smiled with a kind of insouciance, but she just responded with a stupid grin. At that moment he envied his father, who had always been able to choose the right place and the right way to fascinate people with his stories about the life of a miner.
As the old saying goes, you can see the whole world from the roof, or at least you can see the parts you’re really interested in. The young man strained his eyes until they began to hurt, and yet he still couldn’t see anything. At that moment the only thing he wanted was to forget the bad news, and to pretend that nothing had happened — except he had already told his girlfriend and most of his friends what he had heard. In the end it was their sympathy and kindness, and acts of spurious compassion, that made it impossible to forget his bad news. His friends suggested that maybe his father wasn’t dead after all — perhaps it was just a terrible mistake — but none of them really believed he was still alive. He was the only one. He continued to believe — or to disbelieve, as the case may be. He didn’t expect very much in return. He would have settled for the average presentiment, however low-key, or indeed anything else that was likely to persuade him to come down off the roof and go back to bed.
Just then it looked as if it might rain, a heavy thunderstorm. Perhaps it would flood the valley, he thought, with the moonlight reflecting in the water. Under the surface the gasping city would be sure to drown. The only things to escape would be the Serb rockets bombarding the city — and the disbelief surrounding the young man’s father, who was perhaps even at that late hour sitting in a rotting boat and waiting for the trout to bite.
Beard
Juraj’s head lay in the mud like an empty dish into which the raindrops fell. But the soldiers marched past without giving him a second look. A few steps away his neighbor Šimun, who was digging a two-yard trench, stared at the iridescent clay with a peculiar feeling of emptiness in the back of his neck and also perhaps with a kind of premonition, as opposed to fear, that soon his own head would be cut off and used for slopping out as in a prison latrine. Once in a while he glanced out of the corner of his eye at the trench which Juraj had been digging an hour before. Šimun imagined a person measuring the hole through which Juraj’s brain had seeped on to the ground. He admired its geometrical shape and reflected to himself that such a thing could have been molded by a skillful potter rendering God’s creation with ease as if it were nothing but dust and water.
Dinka came with two other women just before nightfall. They were led up the hill by gloomy bearded men in uniform. One of the soldiers turned over Juraj’s body with his foot and mumbled out of the side of his mouth, “Is this him?” Dinka nodded and then looked away. The women departed immediately without glancing back, leaving Juraj in his new position. Now it was possible to see his lifeless staring eyes and the tiny hole in his forehead. His arms were folded on his chest, and his mouth was open, as if he had seen the trail of a jet plane in the sky for the first time. His look suggested that he was about to ask timidly, “What is that?” Šimun would have liked to go over to the body in order to close his friend’s eyes — anything to stop the raindrops welling there like tears — but he wasn’t sure how the soldiers would react, and who knows if Juraj would have looked any better with his eyes shut, or what kind of impression it would create and how much it would continue to haunt the prisoner who was still alive and digging.
Before his capture Juraj had spent four months hiding in cellars, refusing to abandon hope that one day something unexpected would happen to make the Chetniks go away — or perhaps he dreamed of suddenly waking up one morning in a strange country far away, or, at any rate, on the other side of the river. Every day he was visited by Dejan, a poet friend from the Writers’ Club, who had taken to wearing a Serbian cap and letting his unkempt beard grow down to his navel. Dejan was permanently drunk — in honor of the war. Sometimes he gave Juraj a hug and whispered (or burped) in his ear that he intended to sort things out and that the longed-for day would soon arrive when Juraj could once again walk through Sarajevo without shame or fear, like an honorable and decent man. But drunks have an unfortunate habit of suddenly changing their outlook on the world. And so, having consoled his friend, Dejan would often go on to observe in the same tone of voice how excellent it would be if he the Serbian poet were to use his knife to slit the throat of Juraj the Croation poet right here and now on the shag carpet. Out loud he began to imagine Juraj’s death rattle or the blood seeping across the room, or perhaps the fetid smell of his soul escaping from his body and wafting from wall to wall in search of an open window. The monologue usually came to an end with Dejan imagining the ode to slaughter he would write to commemorate killing his friend. Juraj never rose to the bait. He just kept his mouth shut and smiled innocuously like a lamb. Dinka, on the other hand, looked petrified as she stood in the corner of the room, yearning for Dejan to leave and for the next chapter in her life to begin.