Diary of Interrupted Days (2 page)

“‘Your hole is our target,’” Boris said.

“What?”

“I saw a truck in England once—it belonged to some company that specialized in drilling holes through walls. That was their motto.”

“Rats. It was the time of rats, when Milosevic came to power. Underground, negative selection, running in packs, bathing in shit. When the West imposed sanctions against Serbia in 1992, all flights from Belgrade stopped, as you know. Still, people were leaving this dump in hordes. That’s when I decided to do this for living. I thought what the hell, I’ll borrow some money, get a minibus, drive people to and from Hungary. I figured I’d make some money in the
short term, because it can’t last forever. Here I am, still driving. Mostly
to
Hungary.”

He scratched his scar, then continued:

“Maybe this bombing will change something. The noise, if nothing else. They are dropping some large ones, you know. Every time a bomb explodes, I think, ‘There’s another wake-up call.’ Maybe after this I’ll go back to journalism—if people wake up and change something. What do you do?”

“In Canada?”

“Is that where you live?”

“Yes.”

“Doing what?”

“I’m an art director for an ad agency.”

“Nice.”

“Not bad.”

“And before you left?”

“I was a conceptual artist.”

“Really? Tell me something you did, maybe I’ll remember.”

“You won’t.”

“Try me.”

“Okay. The Ice Cream Idol.”

The driver pursed his lips. “Nope.”

“I made a statue of Milosevic out of ice cream. It was in a big cooler truck in the Square of the Republic in Belgrade for one day only. You could destroy the idol by licking him, but then you’d have to taste him.”

“Did you put a stick up his ass?”

“I felt something was missing.”

They laughed.

“What else?”

“Musical Gallows. I built twelve gallows and hung dummies on them, and the ropes were harp wires, all different lengths. They each played a different tone when plucked.”

“It was in the Student Cultural Centre, right? There was a fuss about it.”

“It was banned. The gallows played the national anthem.”

“That’s why I remember it.”

As far ahead as Boris could see the road going their way was empty. All the traffic except their minibus was headed towards Budapest and away from Belgrade.

“Are these cars—?”

“Yes—all escaping to the north. Some Hungarians who live on the border are moving, too. The other day a stray bomb fell on some house in Bulgaria. It’s crazy back home, you’ll see.”

The cigarettes and coffee hadn’t removed that plastic aftertaste from the plane food in Boris’s mouth, and he reached for a piece of gum in his pocket. There wasn’t any. “Have you had any breakfast?” he asked. “If you want, we can stop somewhere and I’ll buy for both of us.”

“Then we’d better do it now. The closer you get to the border, the uglier the people you meet. Some Hungarians see our misery as their chance to get rich. Farmers have converted their stables into bed and breakfasts, and they charge an arm and a leg. You go to a gas station anywhere on this road, and you pay ridiculous sums for gasoline if your vehicle has Serbian plates. By the way, I’m Miša.”

Ten minutes later, Miša slowed to turn right onto a side road. They entered a village, and after taking the first left,
they pulled into a parking lot in front of a small café. It was in a picture-perfect house, with white walls, green shutters, and flowers in window boxes. Miša switched off the engine and they went inside together, and took a table by the window. A petite brunette with large green eyes took their order.

“How did you find this place?” Boris asked.

“I had a flat tire once and limped in looking for a garage. The owner borrowed a spare for me, and didn’t even charge. The waitress—she’s the owner’s daughter.”

“She’s sweet,” Boris said.

“She is. But I come for the food. My wife hugs me each night when I get home safe, but I know that it’s also so she can sniff me. And she checks my clothes for hair. It’s just too complicated to stray and I can’t be bothered.”

Sunlight reflected on the white facades of the houses opposite the café, red and blue flowers on their windowsills. The food arrived and they ate in silence. When they were done, Boris offered Miša a cigarette.

“Which route do we take from here?” he asked as he extended his lighter.

“The usual: Szeged, Horgoš, Subotica, Novi Sad, Belgrade. It’s about two hundred miles, give or take, and a little over fifty from here to the border. I always aim to get to Belgrade before five. They attack after sunset mostly, but sometimes they come sooner. In Hungary, I take it slow and steady—if the cops catch me speeding, I’m in for some serious money. After we cross the border, we’ll go as fast as my bus can stand.”

“Is that what you do if the planes come?”

“That’s what I do. Amateurs park on the side and hide under the trees. But mice don’t lie down hoping the cat won’t see them.” He suddenly remembered to ask: “Did your plane arrive on time?”

“No. We were an hour late. Why?”

“Fuck. Let’s go.”

Boris paid the girl and ran after Miša, who was already turning the vehicle around. “What?” Boris said as he closed the door and the bus veered onto the main street.

“You know how planes have to fly through certain corridors? There are roads up in the sky, just like down here. Some of those roads are in the way of the bombers. When a plane is late, it usually means that its normal corridor is closed and the bombers are coming sooner. We have to hurry.”

Sara had already been gone when the bombing of Serbia started, and Boris’s world had turned surreal. As an artist, he deconstructed reality and reinserted pieces intended to create a shift in perception in those who saw his art. But now nothing seemed real enough to deconstruct. He would turn up every morning at his job on the twenty-ninth floor of a building at the intersection of Yonge and Bloor, and he would try to work, concentrating on shapes and colours, lines and shades, and then find that hours had passed as he stared out the window at the CN Tower. A similar tower had already been destroyed in Belgrade. Sometimes he envisioned a giant condom covering the whole edifice, turning it into a colossal penis aimed at any deity allowing this nightmare to happen. Whenever he put his headphones on and inserted a music CD into his
Mac, he ended up searching instead for radio news on the Internet.

When he pulled into the big underground garage in his apartment building at night, he judged its merits as a shelter from air raids. On the supermarket shelves, he only had eyes for canned foods. He returned from a trip to the drugstore to buy shaving oil with band-aids and antiseptic cream. He melted sedatives under his tongue several times a day, and took Saint John’s wort before he climbed into bed, but slept only a few hours each night.

He was safe in Toronto, far from the fury of metal that was happening in the Balkans. He also knew that his parents would be fine. His father was a retired general, after all, with access to the best shelters. Still, he felt that everything was being destroyed. He had been abroad long enough to start perceiving his homeland as an idea, not a set of particular people and buildings—still it was an idea buried in the foundation of his being. Each building the
NATO
bombers hit was part of the idea. Every time he heard of another bombing, he felt physically ill. His neck and shoulders turned to stone.

Boris thought of going back to Belgrade, but he knew he would be drafted immediately. He talked with his mother almost every day on the phone—he always expected to hear bombs exploding in the background, but never did. They had moved to their cottage an hour south of Belgrade for the duration. They had enough food and his father had brought his whole collection of weapons and ammunition with him, even a sniper rifle he obtained through channels. His mother sounded upbeat and he had
no doubts about his father’s mood, although, of course, they never spoke.

For the first time in years he made a steady stream of phone calls to his old friends in Belgrade, who all talked fast, describing crazy things—how terrific all-night parties were taking place in several of the larger shelters, how people brought drugs with them, and booze, how people had sex and made jokes about the bombing, how everyone had a badge with a target drawn on it. How everyone prayed for their enemies to come on foot, so they could give vent to their frustration.

In the beginning, the bombing victims were just people, somewhere, just numbers. Then, during the second week, they were people with names, people friends of his friends knew. By the third week, they were colleagues.

Boris’s mentor died. The old artist was staying with his family in a city that had not been bombed at all. One night, the raptors finally came to destroy a factory on the edge of the town. The artist was three days short of his ninetieth birthday, and during his lifetime had seen both world wars and the Balkan wars. He was almost completely deaf and mostly blind and did not hear the first few explosions. But then they dropped a large one, and a trace of that horrific sound reached what remained of his hearing. Jolted out of his silence, he asked what the noise was. “It’s a bomb, Grandpa!” his granddaughter replied.

“Not another war,” he said, and died.

At his funeral the air-raid sirens sounded, and everyone abandoned the coffin except one man, himself old enough not to be afraid of dying.

Boris knew that his mentor’s name would not be added to the list of victims, he knew that the cynical
NATO
spokesman would not be apologizing for this death, the way he ironically apologized for other blunders.

Then came the fourth week, and in the chess of death a move that found Boris on a bad square.

The border was close now. Miša switched the radio on and fumbled with the dial, checking for news bulletins. When all he could find was music, he relaxed a little bit.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said, “why are you all in black?”

“I’m going to a funeral. My father died.”

“From the bombing?”

“Not directly, no.”

His father, ever vigilant, had got into the habit of borrowing a horse from a neighbourhood farmer. It was a workhorse, rarely used for riding, and the animal hated having someone on its back—but that’s precisely what had attracted the General to it, his mother said. The owner did not mind lending the mare: he thought that it was the rider who was in danger, not the horse. The General would mount the horse, avoiding its teeth as it tried to bite his leg, and take it for a slow ride among the vineyards on the hill above the village. He would carry his binoculars and his old shotgun, and put on the jacket of his old uniform, claiming that it was the only thing that could protect him from the wind up there, on the hill. The villagers started addressing him as Marshall.

On a sunny afternoon, the General rode uphill some
time after five. The horse returned home alone just before six. While they were gone, a huge formation of bombers from Italy had flown over, going south towards Kosovo. The planes may have scared the horse or some animal had run out of the bushes to startle it. The villagers found the General lying under a pear tree. He was alive, but semiconscious and breathing with difficulty. It took the ambulance an hour and a half to get to him, and almost three hours to drive him to the military hospital in Belgrade—another group of bombers had started attacking the capital in the meantime and the roads had been closed. The General was pronounced dead on arrival. The autopsy showed that a broken rib had punctured his lung and caused internal bleeding.

Like every other bit of news about the General from the past ten years, Boris had heard this from his mother. Boris and his father had stopped talking to each other in 1989, and there were a few years before that when they hardly talked at all. After Boris had moved to Toronto he’d rarely even thought of his dad, and when he did, it was always as the General. The General who went into politics after retiring. The General whose party was directly responsible for his son’s leaving the country, like tens of thousands of others, all young, educated people, artists, doctors, engineers. The General whose political convictions were more important to him than his only son.

“This grandpa from my building, he’s been through the big war,” Miša said. “He told me he’d prefer to die than see enemy soldiers on our streets again.”

“They will never come down from the skies.”

“I don’t think so, either.” Miša sighed. “That’s frustrating. Or maybe that’s good. Perhaps our dicks are not as long as we think they are.”

The music on the radio was some Croatian song, recorded before the war.

“They’re playing that now?” Boris asked.

“It’s as if nothing ever happened.” Miša paused. “People are trying hard to forget that there was a war at all. As if all of it was just an incident caused by the drunken guests in a Balkan bar. I know some people who were in Bosnia and Croatia—they all claim they shot in the air or they didn’t aim. Who did the killings, then? Maybe they’re not lying, maybe mujahideen came, and mercenaries, such scum.”

“We wish,” Boris said. “My best friend was in Croatia for just a few weeks. He saw some ugly stuff that our boys did.”

“What happened to him?”

“Deserted one night. Then left the country.”

“He must have seen something he shouldn’t have.”

Boris didn’t answer.
My best friend. Johnny.
It came so naturally.

They rode in silence. Half an hour later, they saw the customs sign on the side of the road. There was only one car ahead of them, and they were soon at the booth. The single duty officer nodded at Miša, looked curiously at Boris, and stamped their passports. The same procedure was repeated on the Serbian side, and they were through.

The General had retired in 1986 in a regular renewal of the commanding cadre. He went gracefully—got his gold watch, his decorations, and his farewell party. Still, it hit
him hard. He used to say how he could hardly wait to leave the army so he could go hunting, play chess, read all the history books he had piled in his study over the years that he never had the time for. Boris remembered the large old bookcase full of red tomes behind the pompous writing desk in his father’s study, a place he rarely entered. The classics of Marxism, Tito’s collected works and some leather-bound volumes of the regime’s favourite authors. One whole row was full of books in Russian—the lowest shelf behind locked doors. Those who had showed their support for Stalin went to jail after the country refused to enter the Eastern bloc, so the General was discreet about his love for Russian literature. Even when Boris advanced to the grade level in which Tolstoy, Yesenin, Sholokhov, and Gorky were on his reading list, his father refused to lend him his copies—he had translations as well as the originals—giving him money to buy his own.