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In the beginning of the war they called us "Wolves," and we were terribly proud of that - no less proud than we were enraged at being called "Pensioners" later on, as someone from the City Headquarters nickamed us. There were ten of us, protecting a fifty meters wide ravine, up on top of the Black Hill, and we were doing it perfectly well - especially if we take into account that we held
a real weapon for the first time in our lives. We were all volunteers, and many had picked up a gun more out of curiosity than because of a real feeling that we were defending the city from the crazed and armed Peasants who were getting ready for this war longer than we ever thought about war as
such.
Everything appeared like in the movies, at first - until the day a student who liked to be called
Rambo tried to figure out how to use bow and arrow to launch a hand grenade. We were scraping
bits and pieces of his head off the bunker wall and the nearby trees. It sounds stupid to say this, I
know, but we were grateful for his death, because it forced the rest of us to grow up real fast after
Rambo got blown to pieces. After that incident we left the movies as the (only) source of our prewar
knowledge about war to movie actors, while we started feeling the weight of the rifle in our hands
and the heat of the helmet on our heads. Buried into the muddy trenches deep in the bush, we were
forced to grow up like some gentle city plants stuck in the desert.
In the beginning, we used to jump every time an owl would hoot; later on, we payed no
attention to the howling of the hungry wolves in the mountains. The only things that still kept
reminding us of the city and its life-style were empty face-cream boxes we used to keep our booze
money.
The enemy tried to break through our line twice: once we gave them such a thrashing that
they left behind two dead soldiers, some weapons and an overturned armoured personnel carrier.
Those two dead boys, whose pockets contained nothing but some unused postal stamps and a couple
of porn magazines, were accredited to me - and I did not deny it - even though I was quite sure I
never fired in the direction of the place where we found them.
We traded those two dead bodies with them, later on, for a live cow. We put the corpses on
a sled and they pulled it over from the opposite direction; at the same time and speed we dragged
over to our side a skinny and terrified cow. The cow died before the dawn because they, that garbage,
had poisoned it before giving it to us - and she was later counted as the last casualty in the Defence
of the Black Hill. We were bothered by having been duped much more than we cared about having
to drag the dead cow far away from our trenches to bury it.
The next morning we attacked them out of sheer revenge, and the only outcome was that we
used up much of our ammunition and succeeded in siphoning about fifty litres of diesel oil from their
overturned carrier.
We made a deal with them again - to send us a carton of cigarettes for a canister of oil:
cigarettes arrived, and they pulled away a rope with the oil canister we had pissed in as much as we
could, saving the oil for our lamps. Then they cursed our mothers from their trenches, threatening
to shoot our families once they break into the city, and we reciprocated with an even measure,
promising them public hangings at the city square, because we had found out that our cigarettes had
arrived wet. They probably pissed on them.
After that, we stopped trading and attacking each others. It also appeared that our respective
headquarters had forgotten all about us. We listened to the news on our transistor radios, cheering
like we used to do at the soccer games whenever we heard that Ours have defeated the Peasants at
some front or another; the peasants across the battlefield would give us a full measure of the same
thing back, shooting at the trees above our heads whenever the fortunes of war would favour their
side. They were doing it to us more often than we did it to them.
As the time passed, there was ever less shooting and our war soon assumed the form of
verbal combat. We would throw the empty bottles of brandy at them, pretending to remember their
sisters and wives as the cheap prostitutes that could be bought for a pair of nylon stockings, and they
would throw in our direction bare sheep bones and blown up condoms tied to stones, with our flag
scribbled on them. The fifty odd metres of space between us soon became a garbage dump, thanks
to the zeal with which we kept inventing new spites.
The bags of shit that kept piling up in the battlefield between us were thrown from both sides
with quite some regularity: we finally had to ban this because they stank to both sides, especially in
mid summer, but the arsenal of verbal obscenities continued to grow. As we could not see each
other, each side nicknamed the other by the character of people's voices: so, the most vocal on their
side were Ass, Cock, Cretin and Guts; the most prominent nicknames on our side, perhaps because
of the number of tricks played were Bastard, Vulture, Turd and myself, known as Sickness, probably
because of my endless coughing caused by too much smoking.
As time went by no one reacted to the cursing of mothers and sisters any more: that was
something that mainly younger and denser soldiers revelled in. The passage of time elevated
originality to the position of the main criterion that would indicate who could be the potential victim.
We knew even who can easily be insulted in certain ways and how intelligent are individuals on the
other side. They knew just as well who had the weakest nerves among us.
We would cheer up when Cock would start shouting from their side, an obviously stupid and
nervous little peasant who could never take an insult without blowing up. Once we unnerved him
so much that he opened fire against our positions, and then we heard Guts screaming at him that he
will send him off to some real battle lines where he could shoot to his heart's content, without
making trouble for everybody else, like here. The man who ticked him off was our Vulture.
- Little Coooock, listen up, let me tell you something.
- What do you want Vulture? If you are hungry, go to the toilet.
- I am not kidding, I think your mother was right.
- What are you trying to say?
- Well, the last time I was humping your mother, she says `get a condom, you'll make me a
cretin', and judging by you, I guess she was right.
After that, all obscenities went to the account of Cock's mother, and it took us ten days to
realize that he was either forbidden to talk back or he left for some other battlefield.
The weakest point on our side was Turd, a pimpled, pretty stupid guy from the countryside
who came to Sarajevo a couple of years before the war, quickly married quite a pretty daughter from
a well-off Muslim family and as quickly opened a burek shop. After having sent his wife away to
Germany, he was evading military recruitment for six months, hiding in his shop: they found him
only after the city was left without electricity so the reserves of meat in his fridges started to reek.
His neighbours would not forgive him for never once thinking of their hunger while sitting
surrounded by mounds of food. Those from the city had sent him to me, not knowing what to do with
him down there, and I would send him to the city every three days - both in order to get provisions
and because I knew that no one would make up and portray our victories and heroisms more
fabulously than him. We regularly fed such kind of information to our Headquarters.
When I was not sending him to fetch provisions, I would send him to replenish the
ammunition reserves we kept wasting in futile shooting at rabbits and pheasants. Besides, all of us
preferred to have him practice his quite theatrical religious ceremonies at the mosque, rather than
in a cramped bunker where we played cards. All of us felt him like scabies.
Moreover, he was pathologically jealous, leaving the bunker when we would start telling idle
tales about wives and their lovers which we enjoyed as a universal theme. He would not say a word
to any of us for two days straight just because of the way we commented on a photograph of his wife,
saying she was a "good piece."
Turd left an impression that God had made him out of some leftovers. Worse than that was
the fact that in those endless shouting matches, when we desperately tried to stick it to the other side,
his score was catastrophic. His repertoire went no further than cursing their mothers and families,
and even when he managed to figure out something smarter than that someone from the opposite
camp would drop a lid on him so bad that everyone in our trench felt ashamed for him. One could
get away with bad jokes for the first three months or so, but half a year of verbal warfare demanded
at least some originality; without it, there was no way of escaping humiliation. On one occasion Turd
almost got killed because of his stupidity. He crossed voices with Guts, a deep resonant voice
sounding as if it was coming from a cave - a witty joker whose jabs at our expense would feel like
shots, so in spite of the contempt we felt for him as an enemy, we also held a degree of respect for
his sonorous voice.
Once we listened to the radio news that killed our last hope that the war could come to an end
any time soon, when Turd started howling across the field - out of sheer neurosis, I suppose - that
they were murderers and robbers, and that only savages of their ilk could tear down mosques.
- That is no good, we do not like to touch other people's faith either - arrived the pretty
conciliatory voice of Guts from the other side.
- Why then do you keep tearing them down? - Turd was foaming by then.
- We figured out something better. We are producing blow-up mosques, like balloons, so the
next time we open fire, you can quickly deflate it and transfer it someplace else.
Out of his mind with blind ragem Turd jumped out of the trench with his gun in his hands,
and had we not grabbed his legs and pulled him back in, the machine-gun fire that burst across the
leaves above our heads would have cut him down for sure.
And then it was Autumn.
We were still growling at each other pretty happy for not being in the city below, from where
we could hear shells exploding. We opened fire a couple of times at the female underwear one of
them raised up on a stick, claiming that they are his souvenir of Turd's wife - and then there was
silence for some ten days. They were not responding to out provocations, nor was there any smell
of cooking coming from their trenches. And then one night they retreated to their reserve positions,
leaving us their old trenches and the mine field in between their old and new positions.
I informed the Headquarters about the conquest of fifty od metres of space, but instead of any
congratulations an order arrived for me to stay behind with two soldiers only. All others were to be
sent back to the Headquarters, because the mine field between us and the enemy meant that both
sides will function as no more than sentries from then on. I did not relish the fact of being thrown
away into a deep retirement in spite of being one of the most experienced fighters, but I neither
begrudged the fact that Winter was coming and we had plenty of firewood until Spring. Nobody
waited for me in the city anyway, and I owed nothing to anyone. The other guys were drawing lots
from a hat to decide who will stay. Turd's luck unfortunately decided that he would stay there with
me, having drawn a note saying "bush," which he took as a sign of bad luck. My other soldier would
be Lamb, a student of medicine to whom nothing made any difference any more, ever since he buried
both his father and mother within seven days, in the early days of the war.
The others got packed up and left, shouting back that they will regularly comfort our
girlfriends at night and that they will send us a manual with directions about how to use the shower
and blow drier. We really stank like skunks indeed: although I washed my socks and underwear
daily, I could smell the stench of my freshly washed socks drying by the fire five metres away.
And then, finally, smoke rose up from the other side of the field and everything went on as
before, with a notable difference: they also were apparently halved and the only known voice that
remained came from Guts - the other two obviously belonged to some kids in puberty who were just
mutating. They were shouting across what they just had for dinner, making up steaks with french
fries, even though we could smell the burnt kidney beans they ate; we made up stories of having
octopus salad, even though canned meat was the only food we tasted in months. I would fire a bullet
in the air on our side of the bush from time to time, shouting that I have just killed a deer - but our
cauldron kept smelling of kidney beans and disgusting canned food.
That is when it happened.
Cleaning some garbage they left in their former trenches, Turd ran into a bundle of
documents and started reading. Those were applications for divorce that lawyers from some foreign
lands were sending by couriers to the besieged city. I knew the whole storu: after the first year of war
it was whispered all around like some kind of a public secret. And then two soldiers blew their heads
off and ten more tried to escape from the city barracks to reach the countries that divorce applications
were coming from. The Military Authorities shut all those papers into a safe, declaring the whole
issue to be a piece of the enemy war propaganda: an item in psychological warfare intended to
weaken our military morale. I had no one who could use the law stating that long period of
separation is a sufficient cause for divorce, so I used the Headquarters' official release on the whole
issue to roll my tobacco. Turd had read too many of such documents we found, so I could not tell
him lies about the special war - which was a story for little children to begin with. He was burning
with fire as I struggled to wrestl the documents from him, to send them to the Headquarters.
- Look at this whore - he screamed in trance, showing me a piece of paper. - Her husband lost
both legs putting out the fire in their house, so she would have a place to come back to with their
child - and now she wants to divorce him...
- Don't scream - I said. - Those fools across will hear you...
- How could I stop screaming - screw their harlot mothers: we are dying here so that they
would have a place to come back to, while they warm up beds for the Germans and Italians.
He was screaming so loud that I grabbed him by the neck trying to shut him up. He tore my
rank insignia from my shirt. I could hardly care less: I was half decommissioned anyway. The next
day he apologised and for the next two days he kept busy using a tin can to throw mud out of our
trench, made a roof out of leaves and talked to no one.
I did not dare to send him to the city for provisions so I went there myself, not so much
because of the food, but because I wanted to ask the Headquarters to get him off my back and to send
me somebody normal.
The Commander had a meeting, his deputy slept drunk on top of the battlefield map, while
the secretary plugged her nose, gave me a bar of soap and directed me to where the showers were.
I found two drunken boys there, quarrelling about how many of them humped the secretary last night
and whether she was better from the back or from the front.
Having noticed that I am having a shower without taking off my uniform, I went to collect
our rations of food and ammunition, bought a carton of brandy and started making my way back to
the mountain. It appeared to me that up there exists at least some kind of some order.
I watched the Moon waving in the half empty bottle of brandy. Once upon a time, long time
ago, my mother told me that one could die for looking at the Moon for too long. If that was so, I
would have been dead long time ago. A few years before the war I worked in an observatory,
spending more time on the Moon than on Earth.
Reaching our trenche some time before dawn I saw Lamb running towards me and I knew
right away that something ghastly must have transpired. An instant later I saw what happened: in the
middle of the mine field sat a wailing Turd, surrounded by a heap of papers. I howled that he was
an idiot, that he should get back right away before he got killed and that I will have him Court
Martialled - but he just kept wailing: "Which way should I return?"
- What do you mean which way, idiot, the same way you got there - I screamed.
- I don't remember - he said and continued to wail.
That is when Lamb finally explained to me what happened. After I left, Guts started calling
Turd and describing the sexual pleasures women tend to indulge in when they are far away from their
husbands. Guts told Turd how they often preferred to give themselves to lawyers who could not only
work their divorces out, but would also manage to wring the property away from their former
husbands in order to share it with the divorced women - and so on, all in that sense. Turd responded
with curses, of course. The other side loved the whoile exchange, obviously having great fun - and
then Guts shouted it was a pity that he does not know Turd's name because he had a whole bunch
of divorce applications on him, so if Turd was interested, let him read them himself - and then he
flung a whole bunch of papers into the mine field.
I need no more explanations. The wind that used to bring from their side the odour of stinky
socks or of whatever they were cooking, brought a couple of thrown papers straight into out trench,
and those were apparently real divorce applications.
Of course, Lamb could not remember when was it that this fool of a Turd covered half the
distance between the two trenches, ending up in the middle of a mine field. It was all just the same
to him anyway. He understood what was going on only after he heard Turd howling like a wolf and
when they started shotting from the other side. He saw what I saw: there was Turd in the middle of
the mine field, howling and clutching documents in one hand, while propping himself against the
sign that said "Mine Field" with his other arm which bled profusely.
Lamb told me they fired a few shots, meant to scare Turd more than anything else, but they
obviously found it more interesting to joke at his expense than to finish him off. Judging by the
flashes of photo cameras I could suppose that this scene will be seen in many more trenches and
other places. I cursed the war and trenches, and fools and Lamb who was cowering in the corner of
our trench as if he was guilty of something, accepting my insults as something he deserved and
expected. I tried to pull myself together and to figure out some solution, but the way things looked
to me, I could count on God's help alone. Then I fell asleep.
I don't know how long I fought the nightmares, but I woke up spooked by the silence. My
head was aching and an ugly nausea settled into my stomach. Lamb sat by the extinguished fire,
doodling something in the ashes with a stick, in the middle of the mine field sat Turd, not wailing
any more, just whimpering, like a frozen dog. On the other side of the field were the Peasants,
apparently tired of joking. I tried to figure something out but my brain apparently worked badly: all
I felt was pure rage and a nauseating silence around me.
- Guts, why don't you kill him? - I shouted. - Be a man and spare him this misery.
- Why don't you kill him? - Guts responded. - He's your soldier. We don't need him one way
or another.
- The man will bleed to death. If you have any soul left, let me at least throw him some
bandages - I continued.
- I am better than you think.
- Can we make a deal? - I went on without any comprehension about what I was getting into.
- Don't shoot, I will come out unarmed.
- Do as you please. No one will fire a shot from this side.
- Can I be sure about that?
- If my word is good enough, you can - came the message from the other side.
As I packed some bandages into a bag I cursed myself and my stupidity that pushed me into
trusting a man who has been firing his gun at me for months, trying to kill me. I thought I deserved
to become a free target and that I must have been born dumb, if this was the only idea I managed to
figure out.
From the depth of out trench the eyes of Lamb kept staring straight at me: if he had said
anything at all, I would have given up. He did not. I told him not to touch his rifle and if they end
up shooting me down he was under orders to leave the position, go to the Headquarters and tell them
about the meritorious death of two stupids. Then I took a swig of brandy and jumped out of the
trench. I walked slowly towards the mine field, feeling only nausea in my stomach and appearing
bigger to myself than I was. I wished my mother had given me birth as a dwarf. It felt as if my steps
were becomin shorter, while the field that witnessed so many bullets and insults flying to and fro
grew increasingly enormous and menacing.
A pair of blood-shot eyeballs, heavy black bags under his eyes and a muddy uniform - that
was all that remained of Turd. He looked straight ahead and he would not answer me at first, when
I asked him where he was hit.
- In my heart - he finally uttered, not looking up.
He was close to the brink of madness. I threw him some cigarettes and bandages: they fell
right by his side, but he paid no attention. I stood there nervously for another instant, nausea dancing
in my stomach. And then, suddenly, from the other side appeared Guts. I was surprised how much
he did not resemble my images of him. I pictured a husky peasant, closer to ploughing the field than
leafing through a book - but he was tall, skinny and bearded, resembling myself (with my weight not
far off that of a concentration camp inmate), rather than my image of himself.
- I imagined you as a soldier, not so scrawny - he said, with a poorly concealed smile.
- I was totally wrong about you too - I said, assessing the fastest route to scramble back to
our trench.
- You know what, I want to tell you that no one is glad because of what happened to this
wretch. Even though he would not fall on my conscience, I have sent a boy to the Headquarters, to
find the blueprint of the mine field, or the one who put them down. So much from us. As to you,
don't shoot any more, some of you might get hurt - he said and laughed aloud. That was his favourite
joke and we had heard it at least a hundred times before. He also threw a pack of cigarettes to Turd
and we took off to our respective sides.
I dropped into the trench and grabbed a bottle of brandy. My legs hurt as if I had just walked
several kilometres. Lamb would not raise his head even when I pushed the bottle into his hand. He
looked like an endlessly ashamed child. With darkness, sleet started falling. I checked on Turd with
my flashlight and those from the other side did the same. He stared at the ground in front of himself
and smoked. We drank, not so much out of craving, but rather from the need to forget that terrible
nausea that sat in our stomachs not letting us fall asleep.
Around midnight we could hear Turd singing. It sounded like a prayer at first, but later on
we recognized a combination of our and Arab words which, taken together, probably meant nothing
or something only he knew. Now it sounded like a child's lament, then as a prayer, and then like
plain wailing.
He would stop briefly, just to light another cigarette, and then he went back to it again, in a
raspy voice that made our hairs stand on end. Just before dawn he lost his voice, so I went out to
check on him. The tracks in the snow told me that someone from their side must have checked on
him as well. His face was blue and he did not raise his eyes when I begged him to unpack the
bandages and at least wrap them around the bloody sleeve of his trench coat.
I watched that miserable figure that drove me to rage for months. Now it awakened in me
some strange feeling of guilt, perhaps among other things because every word I could think of as
potentially meaningful sounded stupid and hollow, when squared with the fact that there was no way
for me to help him.
Guts appeared from the other side, shouting that they have not found the soldier nor the
blueprint of the mine field yet, but that there is a chance that his boy might find the man at some
other Headquarters.
- Doesn't anybody among you know the pattern? - I tried to feel the terrain suspiciously.
- When they laid it down they gave all of us a leave - answered Guts quite nervously, his
crumpled face convincing me that he was wide awake until the morning. As I was about to leave,
I heard him explain to Turd that those documents that dragged him into the mine field were actually
forgeries printed by his Headquarters as a part and parcel of the special war, and that if he would
have known this could happen he would have never made jokes about the issue. I could not tell
whether he was comforting Turd or apologizing, but whatever it was it sounded unusual. Finally he
said something his Command would have his head for - quite unlikely for someone whose voice we
used to hate for months, imagining the kinds of death we would have him die if we could just lay our
hands on him.
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