The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War

10 IT’S HARD TO KILL A MAN

Sisak is a small town less than sixty kilometres from Zagreb. This is the starting point of the front line. A little to the south, across the Sava, is the last southeastern stronghold of the Croatian army. A few days ago the Federal Army shelled the oil refinery, the hospital suffered several direct hits, the church was damaged. From where I’m sitting, near the door, I can see the street and in the street, right in front of the cafe, a hole made by a rifle grenade. It’s a wonder that the cafe is open at all, I think, for the first time physically aware that the war is close by. A woman is washing up some glasses at the counter. She is wiping them slowly, absent-mindedly, gazing through the window at some frost-bitten pigeons on the pavement across the road. The cafe is almost empty except for a few men in uniform. They stand leaning with their elbows on the counter and drinking beer. The barmaid and I are the only women in the room; the windows are blacked out with paper and the whole place is permeated with the dull smell of weariness. The front seems to begin at the very table where I’m sitting, as if the war is a sort of mythical animal which you can never properly glimpse, though you feel its scent and the traces of its presence all around you: in the woman’s movements, in her look, in the way the uniformed men lean on the counter, tilt the bottles to their lips and then wipe their mouths with the backs of their hands and leave abruptly; in the air of uncertainty which at this moment, for no particular reason, becomes quite palpable.

I sit and wait for my guide to the front to come. The 16 January ceasefire has held for almost a month and this time it seems it will hold, at least for a while; nevertheless, this is as far as you can go unaccompanied. In the undamaged County Hall with its dark-red facade which now houses the Croatian military headquarters and a press office, they told me that the guide’s name was Josip and that he was a veteran, meaning that he had been fighting since the beginning of the war in this area. The man who checked my papers and signed a permit said to me – perhaps because I’m a woman – ‘I only wish I had a plate of hot soup’, as if this sentence would best explain to me how he felt. He might as well have said, I only wish I could get some sleep, or watch a soccer game on TV or have some peace and quiet. Each of his wishes would have been equally pointless. The office was sparsely furnished: an ordnance map of the Sisak region on the wall, a long table and some chairs with metal legs that grated on the floor whenever they were moved. A woman brought in fresh coffee, men in uniforms sitting around the table pored over maps and made notes. As in movies about World War II, I almost expected a moustached commander to stride into the room and for everybody to jump up and salute. The setting was so familiar that for a moment I thought this must be a mistake. No, this cannot be military headquarters, no, this cannot be a real war… Leaving the building, I stepped on some grains of rice that crunched under my feet. There must have been a wedding here only yesterday. The thought of a wedding in the midst of war brightened the gloomy mood of the morning.

I have no idea what I expected when I set out for the front. Probably one subconsciously expects to see the same things as on television or in the papers. One expects to experience at least that same level of dramatic tension that the media offer in the process of editing reality: the usual footage of ruins, fires, dead bodies, soldiers, the bewildered faces of civilians, a concentrated picture of suffering. As the media present it, war at some point turns into a pattern, a mould that needs to be filled with content. What we see each night on television is one and the same thing all the time – destruction, death, suffering. Yet, what we see is only the surface. There are so many other layers, invisible ones. Those far from the front lines must wonder how it is possible to endure such pressure day after day, how it is possible to live at all.

Josip arrives. He is of medium height, thickset, with short cropped hair. He is wearing a uniform, but carries no weapons, at least not now. We set off immediately. Josip drives slowly. We pass several military sentries but everything seems peaceful enough, just the soldiers marking time, trying to fend off the cold. On the muddy slope near the ferry which will take us across the Sava river, Josip gets out of the car and says hello to a small group of soldiers who are guarding the ferry. I have trouble coming to terms with the fact that the front is less than an hour’s drive away from my home. Less than an hour’s drive away and everything is different: dugouts, sentries, the road stretching emptily away before one and an eerie, unnatural silence. Josip is not a talkative man, in any case he seems unwilling to start a conversation. I study his face, his narrow blue eyes, his open smile, his large hands and the unhurried, deliberate way he moves. But his face reveals nothing, it tells me nothing of what the war means to him. I ask him how it all began here. I never thought it would come to this, he says, as if he himself still cannot quite believe that it has come to this. Then he tells me about his neighbour from Sunja who is now fighting on the Serbian side in Kostajnica. His father is a Croat, his mother Serbian and his family has stayed on this side. Josip tells me he has recently seen his neighbour on television passing a message to his own sister that he will cut her throat for marrying a Croat. That’s the hardest thing, he says, the treachery of friends and neighbours who were Serbs and who, all but a couple of them (who are still here), left Sunja on the eve of the first assault because they knew that the village was going to be attacked. They left their cattle in the stables, dinners on the table, washing machines spinning. They did nothing to warn their neighbours and friends with whom they had lived side by side for many years. Why did they do it to us, says Josip and shakes his head. There must have been a conspiracy of silence among the Serbs. And the conspiracy of mortal fear. Why did they say nothing? Could they have stayed here? Did Serbian soldiers threaten to kill them if they gave a warning signal to their neighbours, or were the neighbours already the enemy and no threats were necessary? And how will they ever be able to return to these villages? The way Josip talks about this, I can tell that the memories of the betrayal are still fresh.

We enter Sunja. In front of a wooden house a snowman is melting. Most houses in the main street have been hit, the railway station, the former cafe, the clinic, shops. The street is completely empty, there are no cars or passers-by, no children and no dogs. There are no sand-bags here as in Zagreb, placed to protect shelters and basements; here sand does not help any more. Here and there the holes in the buildings where the doors to the houses used to be are boarded up with planks. There is no glass in the windows, just plastic sheets. Josip laughs, says there are no longer any glaziers here who could repair the windows and it’s not worth the trouble anyway. The shelling never really stops so the soldiers distributed plastic sheets for people to stretch over the window frames instead of glass – at least those people who have remained. We come to the church. The parson rides by on his bicycle but does not stop. Emaciated and bowed low over the handlebars, he rides on because the church entrance is locked and the church tower reduced to a heap of rubble. The church clock has toppled from the tower and broken in two. Now the two halves of the clock loom from the debris like two halves of life, split into peace and war. I look at the sky and the ruined eighteenth-century tower of St Mary Magdalen’s. Suddenly I realize I am standing in the middle of the cemetery. I look about me at the empty sky, the dead street, the caved-in roof of a house nearby, at the eerie absence of life, the shattered time-piece, and a lump forms in my throat. Standing there, I feel I am approaching an edge, an abyss, a turmoil of feelings which I cannot identify, but know is dangerous, and I know I must stay away from it, because then it would be too late for reason, for doubts, even for fear. While I stand there, everything clicks into place with perfect clarity: they attacked us, we responded. Here, war is a simple matter. There are no politics any more. No dilemmas. Nothing but the naked struggle for life. I know that if I had to stay here, this would soon be my reality too.

I must have been standing in the churchyard for too long, because my teeth begin to chatter. Josip gently takes me by the arm and leads me down what used to be the main street of Sunja. In the meantime the daylight has turned to dusk and now the darkness is falling swiftly like a curtain. We pass some shops. The glass of the shopwindows lies shattered on the floor and the shelves are completely empty. But on one shelf, the bottom one, I count nine salt cellars made of light-blue china. I stop and count them, I don’t know why. Or perhaps I do: because this is the true picture of devastation. There is not a single person in the village who’d buy or even steal the salt cellars, not a single soul who could have any use whatsoever for the salt cellars. Getting into the car, I grow tense, realizing how deceptive the peace and quiet is, as if I can already feel the lurking eyes of the soldiers on the other side.

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.