The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 9} TORTURE

The best thing about the war was sleeping outside. In the Dinara Mountains. The cuckoo was our alarm clock. I never saw him, but he always got us up before dawn, for the land was on our side. The Serbs were still asleep, behind the hill and the next. Lazy bastards. Never started fighting before eight. I guess we can thank them for those beautiful mornings. Sunny silent mornings with the best breakfast in the world: a woodcutter’s coffee and povitica bread. We ate in silence, watching the first morning rays deal with the butter still cold from the night.

One of those early dawns, Andro, the crazy boy from Pula, suddenly started talking about the morning dew. In a little while he was shouting about:

“We are fighting for dew! We can’t let the Serbs have the dew! We want more dew! Stupid war! Fighting for dew!”

Then he sprang to his feet and started running around the hill pointing to different spots on the ground.

“Croatian dew! Serbian dew! No-ownership dew!”

Javor, our commander, pulled out his handgun and shot him in the back of his head. Andro fell in the grass like a dead calf.

“Now you can drink it, you stupid son of the ugliest whore in Pula!” the lava-faced Javor spit out of his mouth.

Piti rosu, to drink the dew, became our phrase for dying. I felt a bit sorry for Andro. Among all the members of our squad, I probably had the biggest tolerance for his nuttiness. I owed him.

Andro was a big Madonna fan and even named his rifle after the American pop star. Every now and then he would burst out with “…like a virgin,” in his Morrissey voice. And he always carried a small crucifix in the breast pocket of his uniform. The mini-Jesus was white, but his cross was sort of brown, thus blending in with the dark green of the uniform. The effect was that the small Messiah always stuck out of the pocket as if waving his hands, saying: “Hey guys, listen!” Maybe Andro did, because from time to time he would start philosophizing about the pointlessness of war, not really the type of thing a soldier needs to hear. And every now and then he would do something crazy, like running naked through the enemy line and back, or now, screaming about dew. He was unstable, and Javor was absolutely right to kill him.

But me and Andro once spent a whole night together, drinking and singing out in the open. We had lost our group and spent all our bullets when we stumbled upon a blown-up Chetnik tank. Inside it we found a bottle of rakjia that quickly released our singing spirits. It was the most stupid thing we could do, singing Croatian songs in the heart of a Serbian night. A bullet could have silenced us any minute. But you have to understand that fighting in a war is like playing Russian roulette 24/7. Every breath could be your last. It’s a dreadful thought, but it slowly becomes a thrilling one; you kind of get addicted to it. You even start teasing the limits. We were young and fearless, tired from killing, and couldn’t care less.

Luckily, we were singing the Yugoslavian winner of the 1989 European Song Contest when a dead-drunk Serbian soldier suddenly appeared in front of us, in full army gear. Could he join us? he asked, did we have booze? Apparently he thought we were his countrymen, as we were sitting on top of a Serbian tank and singing a Yugoslavian song. Only after the first sip did he realize that we were the enemy, when he spotted the Hrvatska emblems on my uniform. There was this long moment of suspense as he stared at it and we looked at his rifle. Ours were lying on the ground below us, devoid of all ammunition. Then, Andro saved the night by picking up the song again, and the Serbian guy joined in. Together we screamed like a trio of alley cats, all three of us: “Rock me baby! Nije vazno šta je. Rock me baby! Samo neka traje.”

Eurovision saved my life. Andro saved my life.

At the end of our bottle, Andro came out with the truth. He was gay. He wanted to kiss me. Andro was a handsome kid. Black hair, fair skin, thick lips. I guess he was a Day 156 type, and the war had already lasted half a year and… Okay, I almost wanted to kiss him. (War either makes you a fascist or a fag.) But I just couldn’t, not for the memory of my Serb-fucking father. But we all got excited, and pants went down. Andro jerked us off, me and the Serb. It was the strangest image I have from that fucking war. The crazy gay boy from Pula jerking us off in the deep Dalmatian night, with a prick in each hand: one Serbian, one Croatian.

If we had gay nations, there would be less wars.

I wake up with war shadows fluttering about the bright white room. My dark past tries to balance out my life here in the bright, silent island, where you go to sleep in broad daylight and wake up in screaming sunshine at six in the morning. It’s hard to sleep. I feel like I’m in a hospital. A neon-bright, deadly-silent, no-one-wears-shoes-indoors hospital. Goodmoondoor even walks around his own house wearing only his socks. It’s disgusting.

And this peaceful land has never seen war. Not in a thousand years. Must be the island thing. No extra dew to fight for.

Was it necessary for all those people to die just so that we could claim Knin as a Croatian town? I still ask myself that question. Shortly after the war, I drove through it, this insignificant town of fifteen thousand people. The sight of our flag flying above those broken roofs made me sick to my stomach. I actually had to stop the car and puke. I puked on the land that we had claimed, the land I had been willing to give up my life for. Yet we had to do it. We had to. Don’t ask me why. We just fucking had to.

Every man belongs to a nation, a thing greater than himself. A nation is the sum of our strengths, as well as of our collective stupidity. War makes the former obey the latter.

I get up and go to the bathroom. It’s so freaky clean. This is where the angels shit. I have a holy hangover. Not only from the beer, but also from all the hallelujahs I said on TV. Goodmoondoor was very happy with my performance. His American colleague didn’t let him down.

I wonder if they have a TV guard at the US embassy, some pimpled wacko whose job it is to watch all the local programs and check if they contain some blow-Bush or fuck-the-FBI messages. And then, in the middle of the night, he suddenly would have seen me on the screen, the bald round face that matches the America’s Most Wanted poster on the wall beside the TV set. The Croatian clitsucker that killed the FBI agent in Queens last week, posing as the priest they found dead in a JFK bathroom last Tuesday. I’ve been waiting all night long for the SWAT team to show up, waking up every half an hour. At 4.00 AM I called my love, Munita. No answer.

The holy couple gets up at 7:00. Morning prayer starts at 7:30. Father Friendly has to show up. “Dear God. Save me from my sins.”

After breakfast they take me sightseeing. There the president lives, there the shopping mall is, there they store the volcano water. Here they make the world famous dairy product called Scare, and the swimming pool over there is one of the world’s best. In fact, they do their best to convince me that their country is the “best in the world.” They go on and on about the longest life, the happiest people, the cleanest air, etc. I really want to tell them that a country devoid of brothels and gun shops can’t even think of claiming such a title, but instead the Friendly one nods his head, slowly but persistently, like a Texas oil drill.

Goodmoondoor drops his wife off at the TV station to tape her show and we drive on, though he feels the need to explain.

“I don’t think woman should work outside the house, but my wife is doing her work for God and that is different, I think.”

“She’s working in the house of God,” I have Mr. Friendly say.

Goodmoondoor is pleased with the answer and laughs a bit before asking a rather tricky question:

“What about your wife? She work outside the home?”

Oops. I have a wife.

“She? No, she prefers housework. And I’m very pleased with that.”

“I was very sad when I heard about her accident.”

Oh? My wife was in a car crash? Hope she’s OK.

“Yeah. Thank you,” I say with sorrowful eyes, like a bad actor in a stupid commercial.

“You must miss her very much.”

Oops, there went my wife. This is like watching a thriller movie backwards.

“Yeah, you bet. It’s hard being alone.”

“And you don’t have any children with her?”

Wow. That’s a tough one.

“Eh… No, I don’t think so.” Fuck. That was terrible. “I mean, no. Not technically.” Don’t ask me what I mean by this. I have no idea.

He drives on in silence. He doesn’t ask any more questions. It’s quite uncomfortable. Does he suspect anything? I break the silence by going back to the start of the conversation, women and work.

“But Gunholder, she works in a café?”

“Yeah. I am giving her time. She has time to think. When I was thirty year old, I was on the street. I was drinking. I didn’t see the light. When the wine goes in, the brain goes out.”

I take a good hard look at him. Not so holy after all.

We visit his friend’s church in the neighboring town of Cop War. It looks more like an aerobics gym than a regular church, and the smell of sweat fills the air. His friend’s name is shorter than either of my hosts,’ but it’s much harder to say. Written as Thordur, it sounds like “Torture” when they try helping me out. He has a round face with round glasses and a full, biblical beard. The only modern thing about him is his long hair that he anoints with blessed gel. Actually, he reminds me a bit of my broad-faced father, bless his soul. Goodmoondoor tells me that Torture appears on his TV channel every day. It shows: His speech is loud and clear, as if he were still on camera. He doesn’t let go of the Bible the entire thirty minutes, holding it in his hand like a holy hammer. Once or twice he pounds it into the air as if he were nailing his theses to the front door of his church. His views are unorthodox and extreme, his language more colorful than most.

“People sometimes ask me if you need to be circumcised to enter into heaven. I tell them no. There is no need to. It’s not about the genitals, but the heart. The question is: are you ready to open up the foreskin of your heart and let in the light of the living God?”

The fire of homophobia rages in his eyes. When I look deeply into them I see, through the flames, a skinny gay fellow nailed to a cross belting out “I Will Survive.” Father Friendly adds fuel to this fire, while Toxic remembers his night with Andro.

“We used to have this gay guy at our congregation in Virginia,” I say. “But after I ripped the ring out of his earlobe with pincers, he went from GAY to OK.”

Goodmoondoor looks at his bearded friend like a small boy, and Torture laughs like the devil himself, answering in his fine English:

“Heh, heh. That’s the way to do it. Brand them by the balls!”

Friendly gets carried away. “Or use them as fire extinguishers. I once had an altar boy who looked way too feminine for his age. I had to teach him a lesson. So I used him for putting out candles. With his mouth. I used to tell him, ‘Better to blow the light of the Lord than the dick of darkness!’”

They both stare at me for a moment before they start laughing like two middle-aged fraternity brothers having a chance meeting in a hotel lobby forty years later. “The dick of darkness! Ha ha!”

“Father Friendly was very good on TV last night. Did you see him?” Goodmoondoor asks his friend.

“Yes, I saw him. He’s an excellent footman in the army of God,” Torture says and puts his right hand on my shoulder. The arm of fire.