While we are being ferried across the murky, dark Sava (they tell me that at this very spot they had seen corpses floating on the water), Josip is silent, deep in thought. He told me he was thirty-three years old and was in fact a construction engineer. His face looks quite young and nothing in it reveals his age except two vertical lines cut deep at the corners of his mouth. I don’t ask him anything more. Looking at the muddy road in front of us, again I count the blue salt cellars in my mind. Then, quite unexpectedly, I hear Josip’s voice saying, No, no, as if he is arguing with himself about things I wouldn’t be able to understand anyway. No, he repeats, now looking at me. After the long silence, his words sound strange. I lower my eyes, uncertain whether he is really talking to me. No, the treachery of friends was not the hardest thing, the hardest thing is to kill a man, he says, and uttering those words he stops the car, turns in his seat towards me and looks me straight in the eyes. I stare back at him numbly, I don’t think I expected this. Not for a moment since we shook hands and introduced ourselves had it occurred to me that a man who had been fighting for six months must have done it, must have killed someone. I watched him, our shoulders almost touching in the narrow space of the car. I watch his hands on the wheel and feel beads of sweat break out on my forehead. He is saying it, this sentence that no one dares to say out loud in public. The entire horror is compressed in it: war is killing. The sentence hangs in the air between us like a living thing. What hits me at the moment are two things: his closeness and his awareness of what has happened to him. I still cannot quite grasp what he is saying, or perhaps it would be better to say I refuse to grasp it – it is always somebody else who is doing the fighting, not the people we meet, talk with, have coffee with, travel, work or shake hands with.
It was summer, he is telling me, and a few of us surrounded this man, a Chetnik, in a house at the edge of the village. We hid in the tall grass some twenty metres from the house and waited for him to come out. Hours went by, the heat was terrible, but we couldn’t move. We knew that any second he would run out of ammunition and then he would try to break loose and bolt. I had gone hunting a couple of times before and at first this felt very much like lying in wait for an animal, no difference. I know that at some point sweat began to pour down my forehead and that I suddenly remembered Camus’s Stranger. The scene on the beach before he starts shooting at the Arab. I know, I thought, I know that scene. I could almost see Josip there, lying in ambush. He must have licked his salty lips and a blade of grass tickled his neck but he could not move. Then something must have happened in the surrounded house, so his muscles tensed and at that moment… But I did not shoot, continues Josip, nobody did. It was our first ambush and we wanted to be sure we wouldn’t miss. I had the best position and sometime around noon I could tell that the man inside was getting edgy, he kept looking out, I often saw him near the windows of the house. At one moment I had him in my sights, I could see clearly his long, thin face surrounded by dark, longish hair. And his eyes, the eyes of a man who knew what was going to happen. I remember that my lips were dry as I squeezed the trigger and I thought, I mustn’t miss, I mustn’t miss. But I did not pull the trigger. It’s hard to kill a man. Next time, next time Josip did shoot and after that there was no going back for anyone. Then Josip says the war made a murderer out of me, because there was nothing else to do but to fight back. The last part of the sentence he says so softly I can hardly hear him.
A girl passes us on the road riding a bicycle. She waves to us. Josip waves back, maybe he knows her. This simple gesture seems to dispel the heavy, sinister shadow cast by his grim words. Fat white geese waddle in the yard of a bombed house we pass. A little farther down the road, a woman is washing the windows of a house with a damaged roof. I can see the notion of war expand to encompass the small, everyday things, from weddings and geese to window washing – the whole, rounded reality. Travelling back to Zagreb, I think how another peaceful day at the front has gone by.
That night, at three o’clock in the morning, Sunja came under fierce mortar attack.
11
MY MOTHER SITS IN THE KITCHEN SMOKING NERVOUSLY
‘What do you think. Will they tear his tombstone down?’ My mother sits in the kitchen, smoking nervously. It is winter, draughts of cold wind sweep under the balcony door. She talks about Father. In two years since his death her face has changed completely, most of all her eyes. She seems aloof, distant. She has never been close to me, and now I can hardly reach her, except her quite palpable fear. She does not know how to speak of her fear, the words seem to come unstuck from her lips painfully and then, hard and rounded like pebbles, scatter on the table, falling into the ashtray, into the coffee cup which, when she is not smoking, she grips tightly in both hands. I try to catch them, to string them together with the words she is still holding inside herself, because by now she is frightened of their very sound.
Who is she talking about? Who are they, who are the people my mother is afraid will demolish or damage my father’s tombstone? Every Sunday she goes to the cemetery in the small town on the island of Krk where she was born, about thirty kilometres from the port of Rijeka, where she has lived almost all her life. She usually takes a local bus at ten in the morning and returns at one in the afternoon. She does it regardless of the weather, as if in response to a command. There she cleans the graves of her husband and her son, who died just a month before his father: they are right next to each other. The graves are covered by black marble; dry pine needles and cones drift across them. Then she puts fresh flowers on the graves. From the cemetery she can see the bay. Sometimes she sits and watches the bay and the small town on the hill. But she avoids going up there; rather, she waves down the bus passing near the cemetery and returns home.
I know she does not fear for her son, there is a cross on his grave just like on all but one of the graves – my father’s. She is troubled by the red star, the communist one, carved in my father’s tombstone. The grave is well out of sight, in a shady spot by the cemetery’s northern wall, and the star tiny, almost invisible. But it is the only grave with the star and all the locals know it. She is tormented by the thought. I tell her I don’t know whether someone is going to tear it down, it is possible, everything seems to be possible now. And this will have nothing to do with my father being a Federal Army officer – when he died, officers were not yet the enemies of the people, so he died in time – but with the star, the symbol of the former regime and the Federal Army attacking people in Croatia today. I try to imagine the face of the person who might demolish or damage the tombstone, the face of the star-hater. Or several of them. Could it be the local storekeeper, or the young butcher, or the man from the gas station? In the town there are a few fishermen, a dozen or so retired men who bask in the sun by the newsstand like lizards, the Community Centre secretary (what do they call this place now?), an electrician, a harbour master. Otherwise, there are few newcomers, mainly migrant workers from inland. My mother knows them all, she went to school with them. She knows their children and their grandchildren too. My father also knew them, although he came from Rijeka. Every day he used to play cards with them in the taverna, they came to his funeral and afterwards held my mother’s hand. Who, then, could do it, I wonder? But at the same time I am aware that the question is pointless. When she says them, my mother does not mean anyone in particular. She is not talking about individuals, she is talking about the situation that generates hatred. The war. She is talking about what the war looks like in a small, isolated place on an island where everybody knows everybody, where there are no strangers and people start to search for the enemy in their minds – even a dead one, even symbolic, even carved in stone.