Free Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergovic Page A

rain, a heavy thunderstorm. Perhaps it would flood the valley, he thought, with the moonlight reflecting in the water. Under the surface the gasping city would be sure to drown. The only things to escape would be the Serb rockets bombarding the city – and the disbelief surrounding the young man’s father, who was perhaps even at that late hour sitting in a rotting boat and waiting for the trout to bite.

Beard
    Juraj’s head lay in the mud like an empty dish into which the raindrops fell. But the soldiers marched past without giving him a second look. A few steps away his neighbor Å imun, who was digging a two-yard trench, stared at the iridescent clay with a peculiar feeling of emptiness in the back of his neck and also perhaps with a kind of premonition, as opposed to fear, that soon his own head would be cut off and used for slopping out as in a prison latrine. Once in a while he glanced out of the corner of his eye at the trench which Juraj had been digging an hour before. Å imun imagined a person measuring the hole through which Juraj’s brain had seeped on to the ground. He admired its geometrical shape and reflected to himself that such a thing could have been molded by a skillful potter rendering God’s creation with ease as if it were nothing but dust and water.
    Dinka came with two other women just before nightfall. They were led up the hill by gloomy bearded men in uniform. One of the soldiers turned over Juraj’s body with his foot and mumbled out of the side of his mouth, “Is this him?” Dinka nodded and then looked away. The women departed immediately without glancing back, leaving Juraj in his new position. Now it was possible to see his lifeless staring eyes and the tiny hole in his forehead. His arms were folded on his chest, and his mouth was open, as if he had seen the trail of a jet plane in the sky for the first time. His look suggested that he was about to ask timidly, “What is that?” Å imun would have liked to go over to the body in order to close his friend’s eyes – anything to stop the raindrops welling there like tears – but he wasn’t sure how the soldiers would react, and who knows if Juraj would have looked any better with his eyes shut, or what kind of impression it would create and how much it would continue to haunt the prisoner who was still alive and digging.
    Before his capture Juraj had spent four months hiding in cellars, refusing to abandon hope that one day something unexpected would happen to make the Chetniks go away – or perhaps he dreamed of suddenly waking up one morning in a strange country far away, or, at any rate, on the other side of the river. Every day he was visited by Dejan, a poet friend from the Writers’ Club, who had taken to wearing a Serbian cap and letting his unkempt beard grow down to his navel. Dejan was permanently drunk – in honor of the war. Sometimes he gave Juraj a hug and whispered (or burped) in his ear that heintended to sort things out and that the longed-for day would soon arrive when Juraj could once again walk through Sarajevo without shame or fear, like an honorable and decent man. But drunks have an unfortunate habit of suddenly changing their outlook on the world. And so, having consoled his friend, Dejan would often go on to observe in the same tone of voice how excellent it would be if he the Serbian poet were to use his knife to slit the throat of Juraj the Croation poet right here and now on the shag carpet. Out loud he began to imagine Juraj’s death rattle or the blood seeping across the room, or perhaps the fetid smell of his soul escaping from his body and wafting from wall to wall in search of an open window. The monologue usually came to an end with Dejan imagining the ode to slaughter he would write to commemorate killing his friend. Juraj never rose to the bait. He just kept his mouth shut and smiled innocuously like a lamb. Dinka, on the other hand,