Dejan soon got bored anyway. On the way out he’d shake hands with Dinka as well as Juraj, and leave yelling, “Your Dejo’s looking out for you, so don’t worry! He’ll save you, goddamit! A true friend ain’t just a button, see, and his wife’s not a zipper, either!”
As soon as he’d gone, Dinka would begin to cry, and so Juraj would stroke her shoulder with the tips of his fingers, because there was nothing to be said. The couple had a sneaking suspicion that one day Dejan would honor one or the other of his promises, and yet it was hard to know if he was more likely to rescue them from murderers or to deliver the fatal blows himself.
One day a gang of bearded men whom they didn’t know burst into the cellar. These anonymous thugs proceeded to beat up Dinka and to “draft” Juraj into what they called “the labor platoon.” As a result, he spent months on the front line, and only ten yards or so from the Bosnian line, digging trenches. Often he would recognize a soldier on the opposite side by the color of his eyes or the way he walked. Out of delight he would open his mouth to speak to his comrades, but they just ducked their heads, so he was left having imaginary conversations with their gun barrels. At first he panicked in case the warring armies opened fire, but as time went on he came to realize that the killing would not begin unexpectedly. There would have to be a kind of advance warning, he was sure, a portent in the sky, or perhaps a dawn chorus prophesying death, in order to distinguish the day of slaughter from the others that had preceded it.
Dejan continued to visit Dinka. He brought her food and claimed drunkenly that only he could save Juraj, and that he knew Juraj would do the same for him if, heaven forbid, the tables were turned and the Ustashas were defeating the Chetniks. Dinka merely nodded her head, looking forlorn, so Dejan tried to get around her by telling jokes.
One day he asked her, “Tell me, Dinka, would you let me fuck you if I managed to get Juraj out of the shit?”
Dinka looked away, her lips trembling with fury, but she remained silent.
“Listen, sweetheart, I didn’t say I wanted to or anything. I’m just curious — would you let me? Don’t you see that I have to know what kind of person you are and how fond you are of Juraj? Take me, for example. I couldn’t be more fond of him than I already am. If I thought it’d save his bacon, I’d let you fuck me. Honest! Without a second thought. So it’s really a question of who cares more about your husband — you or me?”
Dejan left the house volunteering to go to Pale, if necessary, in order to save Juraj. He warned her not to get upset about his teasing. We’re human beings, after all, not animals, he said.
Dinka couldn’t help remembering that conversation as she was coming down the hill with the other women after identifying Juraj’s body. She was still trying to comprehend that her Juraj was no more, and that nothing was left of him except a hollow skull. As she wiped her eyes she saw Dejan beaming at her in the distance. He was running up the hill and waving a piece of paper above his head. Dinka prayed that he would just vanish into thin air. He stopped in the middle of a sentence but she couldn’t bear to look at him or to listen to what he was saying about headquarters. . orders from the very top. . the real important people. . the necessary papers. . All she could think was, “How on earth does he wash that beard — does he shampoo it or does he just wash his face in the morning like everybody else?”
Chico the Seducer
On a clear day, if you look hard enough, you can see a neat line running horizontally across Mount Igman as if it had been drawn with a pencil. From the line upwards the mountain is covered in snow, but a pale green forest grows on the lower slopes. Armin spends most of his time above the line, in the white, so to speak, because he’s fighting the enemy and a guy named Mitar Kalpoš in particular, not to mention that innkeeper from Vogošć who has a tattoo of Zagor the cartoon hero on his left shoulder and is known as the Beast. Sometimes in the course of a battle, however, Armin goes down the mountain as far as the green, though he claims never to notice the white becoming green or vice versa. It’s just a question of perspective, because whenever Armin comes over here, and especially when he climbs to the top of Budaković, near Kožara, he can plainly see the clear line on Igman. After all, he’s not stupid or blind, is he?
Once I asked him, “Have you really been above the line on Mount Igman?”
He replied, “As God is my witness.”
“And below? Have you been there too?”
Armin looked exasperated. “You idiot!” he exclaimed. “How on earth could I have been above the line if I hadn’t also been below it?”
“Were you ever on the line itself?” I asked.
He didn’t reply at first, and then he just muttered that he couldn’t remember. He’s a bit eccentric, you see. Put it this way: he’s twenty-seven, right, and he’s fighting against the Serbs, but when he talks about the enemy he doesn’t call them Chetniks or anything like that. Instead he calls them damn raving Redcoats, or Comanches, or robbers from the Rio Grande. He reckons that way it’s easier to make sense of the war. Mind you, I’m not convinced. I think he just describes the war in terms of a comic strip because he thinks it’ll help me to understand what’s going on. “Harun,” he says, “you’re only twelve. You don’t know what it’s like to be wounded and still have to kill twelve more Redcoats. Let me give you some idea: it’s your last few moments of consciousness, so you grab one of them by the legs and wave him over your head, then you knock out the other eleven before you finally black out.”
Armin has been wounded hundreds of times, and yet he only has one scar. He boasts he has others which you can only see when he takes his clothes off, except he doesn’t want to undress. I think he’s lying, because I saw him once as he was washing in the yard. He’s intact.
Once I voiced my suspicions, but he just got angry. “Boy Wonder!” he yelled. “We’re finished! Because you’ve betrayed me, and that’s unforgivable — you know that Robin never betrayed Batman, don’t you?”
Armin sat on the wall and lit a cigarette. He refused to look in my direction for several minutes. Then he asked me, “Do you know what happens when the wolves from Ontario cry?”
I didn’t reply, so he asked the question again. I felt awkward. I didn’t know what he wanted. How could I? I’ve never read a comic with crying wolves from Ontario, “Armin,” I said, “I don’t know that cartoon.”
He motioned with his hand and sighed, “You’re dumb, Boy Wonder,” then he fell silent and just stared at Mount Igman.
The next day he went back to the mountain, climbing up through the green at first until he reached the line and crossed over into the snow. He was going to fight the Serbs who were under the command of the innkeeper with the tattoo of Zagor on his left shoulder. A long time ago Armin promised me that if he ever captured this enemy leader he would peel the skin off his shoulder and give me the tattoo as a present. I was planning to frame the scalp and hang it up on the wall. It would be so much better than any other spoils of war.
“Tell me, Armin,” I asked him once. “How d’you know what kind of tattoo the innkeeper has on his shoulder when you’re in one trench and he’s in the other?”