A policeman came and told me to move on. So I went past the double green globes; I left the people who were going somewhere (a girl in high heels galloped by me, biting her lip with concentration, and one of her breasts struck my cheek); so I too went my way, obeying the same law that dispersed the others. .
THE BACK OF MY HEAD
There came a sharp low snapping of the air, somewhat louder than before, and then another at a distance, which briefly and metallically rippled. But these variants were incidental to the main sound, the weighty unpleasant sound of earth falling on earth, as if for some burial. Granted, they were all different in their unhappy way, like a chain of sobs. Now somebody was dropping things, slowly, with a nasty kind of weariness. Something thudded down. White smoke rose diagonally and lethargically in the hot air. So it was not fuel or tires burning. Analyzing was the first step to not listening (at least to the more distant impacts). After three or four days I no longer felt a naked tenderness at the back of my head where I imagined a sniper taking aim. I could feel the nose of the bullet pointed at me just as you can feel eyes staring at your back. No matter which way I turned, the sniper who was going to kill me kept the back of my head in his sights. The spot of tenderness was small, round, localized. Why it was that particular place (the center of the occiput) I could only theorize. Perhaps it was because it was 180 degrees from my eyes, the farthest possible point from anyplace that I could ever see, the place where I used to shoot cows to be butchered. This absurd and useless sensitivity persisted until my visit to the morgue at Koševo Hospital. On that day as always I was in the back of the car, gripping the doorhandle as the militiaman shouted to the driver to move his fucking ass because we were in a very dangerous open place and so we screeched around the corner and then the driver floored it; I saw the speedometer pass 120 kph and then we made another sharp turn. The back of my head itched. Not too far away, a sound came like a resinous twig bursting cozily in the fireplace. Then something ripped horribly. I remembered the UN observer at the airport coming to his feet at a similar sound, saying: That's bad. I don't know what that is. Sounds like a chain gun, but they're not supposed to have those. Maybe a rocket. — Last week's casualty list at the Holiday Inn, prepared by the Institute for Public Health, had figured up 218 killed and 1,406 wounded in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which worked out to 90 deaths and 540 injuries in Sarajevo, which became momentarily intelligible when, as I said, I smelled the day's harvest at the morgue and saw the dried blood on the floor. With no electricity and no water a morgue is not very nice. I saw the unidentified man whose legs had been blown off by a grenade. By law they had to keep him for twenty-four hours while he lay swelling and reeking on the table, a mass of shit and blood demarcating the end of his stomach. Next to him lay the twenty-five-year-old man with the bloody face (one wound was all that he had, a neat drilling from an antiaircraft gun); he was covered with flies and his hand was clenched and his naked body was reddish brown but blotched with a terrible white whose contrast with the extraordinary yellowness of the child's corpse (an antitank grenade had solved him) seemed almost planned, aesthetic, unlike the child's doll-face grinning, the eyes dark slits. From the child as from the others came the vinegar-vomit smell. It was unbearable to see how his head moved when the pathologist tried to unwrap the sheet, turning him round and round as his little skull shook; and in the end the pathologist could not do it because he'd been fossilized in his own dried blood, the sheet now hardened brown and crackly againsj his belly where the intestines had mushed out. Still the pathologist endeavored to remove the sheet in a professional manner, and the doll's head jerked rhythmically back and forth; so that I recollected a small Croatian girl I'd seen in a park in Zagreb; she had reddish-gold hair and was swinging. She moved almost like this doll. Sometimes she just seemed passive, with her legs locked out in front of her; at other times her knees hinged urgently until she made rapid arcs, but the creak of the swing was always the same. A man with a military crewcut sat smoking; his hair was the color of his smoke. After awhile he threw the cigarette down into the sand. It lay beside a boy's plastic spade and continued to smoke. Four boys came by and snatched it up. They passed it around from hand to hand and tried to make each other inhale. The one who'd actually found it kept his prize, watching the smoke rise from between his fingers as they all went off shouting together. The girl went on swinging. — This next one was killed several days before, said the pathologist. Perhaps you don't want to look. — The head, tiny and black, was a ball of swarming insects which for some reason had not yet attacked the yellow bloatings below. Beside him lay a woman, smiling, stained with blood.
Do you think these people died in great pain? I asked the pathologist. You look at them every day; maybe you know what they know…
He took me into another room. — This young boy lived three days, he said. See how his stomach is open? They say he screamed day and night. But I think he's an exception. My brother was wounded last month by a grenade. I asked him what he felt. He told me that he felt nothing. He was injured very seriously in his arm. He said it was not until later that the pain started. So I believe that most of these people felt nothing.
His words comforted me. When I left the morgue, returning to the not-yet-dead outside the hospital's dusty window-shards like gray scraps of cloth where a man sat flirting with the nurses, his hand-bandage sporting a blaze of autumn, and a smiling girl took the sun with her friends, offering to God her deep scars just under knee and eye; I got back into the car (the militiaman had refused to go in with me because last time when the pathologist raised the sheet on an unidentified body it turned out to be his friend's), I found that the tenderness at the back of my head had gone away. I wasn't afraid of being shot there anymore. I feared only getting my stomach blown open. In general, of course, I remained just as afraid. A week later, when I was standing outside one of the apartment buildings near the front, waiting for my friend Sami to buy vodka, I felt a sharp impact on the crown of my head. Reaching up to explore the wound, I felt wetness. I took a deep breath. I brought my hand down in front of my eyes, preparing myself to see blood. But the liquid was transparent. Eventually I realized that the projectile was merely a peach pit dropped from a fifteenth-floor window.
IT'S TOO DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN
She sat next to me at the table, utterly trapped in silence while the laughs burst around her like shells. Finally I asked her why she was so unhappy.
It's too difficult to explain, she said.
Try.
You have only a few words. I have only a few words.
So it's not the war, then, I said. I think you were always unhappy.
She leaned toward me. — Yes, she said.
Me too, I said.
She smiled. She laid her pale hand down on my hand. I felt a violent tenderness for her.