Free Diary of Interrupted Days by Dragan Todorovic Page B

for a soldier. We were next to a yard gate and when she bent over, I could see a tattoo on her lower back. The letters were old German, hard to read. Small print, three lines. Had someone passed by, he would have seen us, screwing like dogs at the gate, but it still took me an hour to come. Well, maybe I had a cheap watch, but it was the best fuck of my life. You know why it took me that long? Because I kept trying to read the tattoo. See? At first, I thought it was so kind of her to have something for people to read while they were fucking her. Years later I realized it was her neat little trick to squeeze the best out of her riders. How is that related to this now? This uniform on us, my friend, is the tattoo on our asses. Think about it. Lay low, and stay low.”
    Johnny’s hand was already on the latch when Pap waved at him to wait. He opened a drawer in the desk, pulled out a watch, and threw it to him. “Here. You never know. Keep it, I have more here. They are a gift from the Candyman for our boys.”
    Johnny looked at the watch. It was a Rolex. He looked at Pap.
    “No blood on them. They are from a truck that was parked on the wrong side of the road somewhere in Austria, I’m told.”
    Johnny went outside to sit under his birch tree again. Not noticing a root hidden in the leaves, he tripped over it and fell. He cursed, rolled over, and decided to stay where he was. He looked at the sky. It was low and claustrophobic.The flatlands in the distance were his country, which he and others like him wanted to keep together, but he felt only coldness coming from there. He didn’t want to die fighting for this place.
    He tried to block the wisps of quiet conversation drifting towards him. He thought of Sara … She was probably trying to find him, trying to do something about his being here. And Boris—he must be accusing himself now, as he always did. He was desperate when he returned from meeting his father. But he’d be there for Sara—she could count on him.
    After a while, the wind seemed to carry all the sound away. And then, just as his eyes were closing, he was certain he could actually hear the silence. It was dark, and gentle, and it fell in flakes, like black snow. A thought accompanied him into the blackness: my whole world is freezing now.
NOTHING GOING ON.
December 13, 1992
    More people joined the camp, some of them in civilian clothes and without any visible arms, some of them apparently Black Lions. They moved to an abandoned socks factory, which—in spite of the broken windows and the stink of bird droppings—gave them much better protection than the few tents they’d had in the clearing. Someone had even fixed the water so they could use the showers and toilets, though there was no electricity.
    Johnny was grateful when Pap gave him a spare notebook and a pencil. He started jotting down fragments of conversation,a verse here and there, some notes. He’d had music in his head as far back as he could remember. It was fully orchestrated and grandiose when he was happy, edgy and fragmented when he felt bad. Now all he heard was the echo of his shredded thoughts. Perhaps it was time to write a book. He had wanted to write one for the past—how long? Six years? Eight? At first he thought that maybe he would write a memoir but realized that too much had happened to him—his memories were overgrown and dense, like jungle. Once, during a dinner party, he had sat next to a well-known writer and confessed his desire. “Of course you want to write a book,” the writer said. “And I dream of making a record. We all want to jump out of our skins, but in the end only a few do it.”
    Definitely, this was a great time to jump out of his skin. The only good thing about sitting here in the backwoods was that the notion of war had thinned out. Weapons and uniforms, trucks and orders—yes, all that, but other things too: listening to the wind and the murmur of dry leaves, watching the endless movie of the