“Why? Who?” Ilinčić gasped several moments before he died.
“Nora Kirin,” was the last thing Schweppes said. He didn’t hear the gunshot, all he felt was warmth gushing from his neck and down his back, his knees buckling, and a sudden lightness in his head. The waiter-receptionist clutched the pistol and through his small, yellowed teeth, hissed:
“You filthy piece of shit! And you would like to rule!”
ÄÄÄ
Platforms
today is tuesday
nowhere left to go
She’d never crossed over to the other side of the cemetery. Killed a few months after the end of the fighting in a drunken brawl, her father was buried as a fighter along what was known as Šajkača Avenue, named for a style of Serbian military cap, in a cemetery laid out in 1994 where seventeen demolished houses had once stood. After peaceful reintegration, the local authorities kept doing what they could to move the cemetery, explaining that it had not been set up according to regulation and was an affront to the victims. The huge cap-shaped šajkača symbols that had ornamented the gravestones were taken down, the graves redone, and the cemetery was annexed to the older, adjacent Orthodox cemetery. The owners of the demolished houses were compensated. The accounts were settled, but the hatred a constant. Olivera placed a rose by her father’s name, and then, for the first time, went through the dense darkness over to the other side. She walked by 938 white stone crosses and stepped into the memorial burial ground of the defenders. She circled around and lost almost an hour looking for him. There were fresh flowers, a message, a candle with the tricolor Croatian flag and the red-and-white checkerboard. On the monument there was a photograph of him, with young face and broad shoulders in his uniform. Her son’s visage decked out in enemy regalia. Back in those days there was a lot of drinking and madness, euphoria and nausea were part of everyday life, but her nausea, that morning, was different. After that, the sickness was like clockwork: as soon as she opened her eyes her stomach would turn inside out, and only then could she continue with her day. She soon confessed this to her father, she had no choice; her nose bled from the slap he gave her, she was barely able to keep her balance, and the next day she left for Mladenovac. She spent the days there shut up in the house, in a city where there was not the slightest hint that only an hour and a half away by car there were thousands of fresh corpses and concentration camps. The reality normal for the people in the city seemed monstruous. This was the weirdest part of all. She gave birth a few days after her father was killed—stabbed in the back during a saints’ day celebration. Her aunt grabbed the baby with her big hands, wrapped it firmly like a mummy in a diaper, tore it from Olivera’s arms, and urged her to go back to the city alone, without the child. Dejo didn’t cry at all; his big dark eyes peered everywhere, and he made sounds only when he was hungry. The two women clashed more and more often. His aunt was always claiming he was hungry, until once they both grabbed for the little bundle at the same time and it slipped softly off the ottoman. Olivera leaped up, appalled, and lifted him from the floor, pushing the huge woman away with superhuman strength while one bare breast full of milk shone white, flopping over her shirt. She boarded a bus that day and went home. With her baby. She quickly found her footing, started her work with the butcher shops and made her way as a single mother.
Life in the city in ruins limped along. Only the most essential things were repaired; all the poverty-stricken people from the regions devasted by war in central Bosnia, Republika Srpska, SAO Krajina, Knin poured in like rivers. All the people who couldn’t make a go of it anywhere else ended up here, and with their joint efforts they changed the faces, spirit, and atmosphere of the city. And they quaked in fear of vengeance, deeply aware that someone else’s house could never become their own this way. The turning point didn’t come with guns and trumpets but with ordinary signatures on a piece of paper. Hence the bitterness and vengeance didn’t run rampant; instead they were left buried deep beneath the layers of consciousness, foundations, earth in amounts large enough to smolder for decades to come. She came across him in a photograph in the local papers. He was standing with several defenders and members of the housing commission in front of the entrance to the building where she lived, holding keys to the apartment he’d been awarded. When they ran into each other one morning in the parking lot while she was taking Dejo to school, he didn’t recognize her straight away. She walked by him, and when she turned, her back rigid, she saw that he, too, had turned. His gaze struck her like lightning. She spent that night smoking by the window, thinking to write to her brother in Stockholm. She didn’t. He looked straight through her each time until they’d walled off the past. Tacitly and irretrievably. They never greeted each other, behaving like people who are capable of separating from themselves and their past. For that very reason it never occurred to Ante that the brown-eyed gentle boy was his son, the offspring of those long-ago sessions of interrogation and drunken brawls in Begejci. The boy who would fire two or three shots into him and was deeply in love with his wife. Olivera placed the second rose on the
