Love and Obstacles (18 page)

I always enjoyed destruction; there was always something breathtaking in effecting obliteration. I had been prone to laying waste: I had liked to take a hammer to a toy car or to drop marbles from my balcony and see them explode on the pavement. I had torn pages, one by one, out of a book I disliked, until there was nothing but the meaningless cover. After all, I had even enjoyed wiping the chalkboard clean. But I had never been remotely as elated as when I watched that shed burning, when I witnessed the idiotic helplessness of the Security Guard spraying the inferno with his beer. And we knew that it was but a rehearsal for taking down the skyscraper, once they completed it—in the blaze of the shed fire I could see the Building of Doom collapsing unto itself.

It didn’t matter that the shed was an actual outhouse. We watched the Workers retching and pinching their noses as they kicked the torched walls in, exposing an impressive mountain of shit. For a while afterward, the Workers, their bowels irritated with whatever bile they were served out of a large vat at lunchtime, scurried over to squat behind a stack of steel beams, clutching their communal roll of toilet paper. We had plenty to feel victorious about: A shithouse was a legitimate target, impeding the logistics of the building construction, not to mention that we had gotten behind the line of an enemy who didn’t even know what had hit them. When we reconvened a couple of days later, I said:
Fatch ah salling frow, sure yeah, fut ow gnore tocket,
which I helpfully translated as: “The next thing, my friends, is the barrack.”

We needed a lot of lighter fluid for the barrack. Collecting the little containers—the torpedo-shaped, finger-sized things—would have taken forever and would have cost too much. We had been stealing a lot of money from our parents’ wallets to finance the Garden War, and the guy at the newspaper stand had already asked Mahir whether his dad was running his car on lighter fluid. Djordje assessed that a few cans of gasoline or some other flammable liquid would suffice. We broke into more storage rooms looking for something combustible that someone may have unwisely put away with some old pillows and rugs. We found no fuel, but there were a lot of coats, picture frames, defunct vacuum cleaners, old records and books, disintegrating furniture—the detritus of paltry existence. I could not imagine that anyone would have ever noticed or cared if it were to burn down.

And as I was saying that, I noticed Alma scanning my office: the plastic cups blooming with blunt pencils; a malachite ashtray; a cameraless lens; a bowl full of international change, collected on my writerly peregrinations; unframed pictures pinned to the corkboard above my desk, fading and curling upon themselves.

“You know, when I went back to Sarajevo for the first time after the war,” she said, “I had to clean out my parents’ apartment so I could sell it. So I made three piles of stuff: one to throw away, one to give away, and one to take with me to New York. The New York one fit into a suitcase. When I got back home, I put the suitcase in a storage room and haven’t opened it since.”

But see, for us, the war was elating, the freedom inherent in erasure, the absolute righteousness of our cause—we loved it all. Everything looked more beautiful from the top of the Mountain of Doom. And the life of stealth and deception, the feeling that we always knew far more than the people around us. Now we were courteous to our neighbors, deferential to the elderly; I did my English homework regularly, volunteered to sing in class. I knew that the pretending, the sacrifice, would help me perform my duty; the lies were an essential part of our mission. I found pride and beauty in self-denial, and finally understood what my parents meant when they said, “Sometimes you have to do things you hate doing.” Even if they meant it in relation to being forced to have haircuts or to wash the car with my dad.

And after our good-boy performances we would get together in the basement and plot the Great Attack. Djordje thought that we ought to keep pressure on the Workers, never let them rest, while we were preparing for Doomsday. So as our parents imagined that we were playing marbles or watching a Disney movie at Kino Arena, we were wrapping sand and crushed glass into newspaper sheets that we would wet before the action. We called that weapon the Grenade; it was my invention, the idea being that the wet paper would break upon impact, and the sand mixed with glass would stick to the skin, and when the Worker tried to wipe it he would cut himself or scrape his skin off. And if we got him in the eyes, he could lose his eyes.

We threw Grenades and rocks at the Workers; we scattered nails at the truck entrance; we stuck matches into the barrack locks; we lit up lighter-fluid containers and cast them randomly across the fence. And as the building progressed, we refined our tactics. We learned that to attack the Workers was not prudent: there were too many of them, their movement was unpredictable, they far outnumbered us, and by now they worked high up inside the building. Therefore, the Security Guard became our main target. When others worked, he lingered around the barrack, opening and closing the gate for the trucks—he was often within a Grenade throw. He had a globular wart on his left cheek, which stuck out even if he was unshaven; there were dandruff droppings on his sloped shoulders. He wore a dun uniform, and a cap with a required red star that would have given him soldierly authority if it hadn’t been so filthy—we had seen him wiping the sweat on his neck with it. In the evenings, he was alone, unless he had talked some Workers into staying and drinking with him, but even then, they would go home sooner or later. He didn’t seem to have a home; we watched him wandering around the construction site languidly; I would have him pinpointed with my rifle as he sat at the barrack steps staring into some invisible distance—with a real weapon, one easy shot would have sufficed. Sometimes he would pull out a kitchen rag and unwrap it and take a piece of bread and some meat out of it; he munched detachedly, without appetite, as though the purpose of chewing was to make his jaw less lonely. God knows what he was thinking about; most likely it was nothing. We often caught him unawares and pelted him with rocks and Grenades, but had few direct hits.

For the longest time, he could not figure out who or what was after him; people like that take their own suffering to be a condition of their existence. Once he innocently bought a naked-lady magazine from Djordje, who went to the gate and called him over; we were supposed to attack him at that moment, but decided instead that his money would be more useful to us. He did not recognize that he was at war: we enjoyed watching his confusion, his vague, passive awareness that he was surrounded by the usual malice; we reveled in the fact that he didn’t know who we were,
what
we were.

But as stupid as he was, the Guard eventually caught on. In fact, he nearly captured Vampir, who was writing messages featuring fucking, mothers, sisters, and children on the barrack. He sneaked up on him from behind, and started punching him, but Vampir managed to wriggle out of his hands and take off over the fence in a blink. We orchestrated a revenge attack immediately thereafter. We pelted the Guard with paper bags full of pebbles—Cluster Bombs— and had a few handsome direct hits. He cursed at us with venom and hatred, and after that, it was clear the war was to be fought until one side suffered a consummate defeat.

And around that time we suddenly recognized we had long abandoned the hope of regaining the garden. We would not have been more satisfied if somehow, miraculously, the sovereignty of the garden was restored. Indeed, we would have lost our purpose. All we ever thought or talked about was how we could hurt the Workers as personified by the Security Guard; that was what the goal of the war had become, and we could imagine nothing before, after, or beyond it. It was like being in love, except we wanted to kill him. Beside the obliteration of the skyscraper, our dominant fantasy became torching the barrack while the Security Guard was in it.

For that, we needed fuel. One day, we lucked out: a picture frame shop by the train station burned down. We saw the smoke rising, we heard the howling of the sirens. Ever interested in ruination, we rushed over and watched the firemen douse the shop through the shattered front windows, while the owners, a husband and wife, wept and embraced, trying not to look at it. We went back to the smoldering shop the following day, walked over the warm ashes, here and there mushed up into cinereous mud, and inhaled the smell of charred wood and scorched mortar. We sifted through the rubble of the owners’ lives: a woman’s shoe with its heel completely melted; half a chair, leaning on the absent leg; frame corners still on the wall, still symmetrical. In the back of the shop was an unburnt corner: a stained blue overcoat still hanging; a framed picture of a wedded couple, facing the ceiling; and right by the back door, three beautiful cans of paint thinner.
Sengson clotion wicklup,
I said. We got what we needed.

Let me confess: I was perfectly aware that there was something inappropriate in my telling this story to Alma with so much pleasure. She must have found the boys entirely and typically aggressive, violent, and silly; she could have been hurt by the ease of their blood thirst. She was certainly not someone who could see the beauty in war, but she expressed no dismay—in fact, she showed no emotion at all. Occasionally, she looked into the little screen and adjusted the camera because I had wriggled over to the edge of the frame. And I am submitting that I was—how shall I put it—perversely amplifying certain details so as to elicit some reaction from her, to see her feel. But she was as stoic as her digital video camera.

“Do you want to take a break?” she said. “You’ve been talking for an hour.”

“No, not at all,” I said. “I like talking. I can talk forever. ”

One evening, we sneaked the cans through the tunnel, the mud from the day’s rain soiling, possibly clogging up, my rifle. We scurried over to the hidden space between the barrack and the fence. We planned to soak with paint thinner the walls of the barrack in which the Guard was sleeping, make an inflammable puddle before the front door, so as to cut off his escape route, and then set it all ablaze. It should have been an easy mission; it should have lasted only a couple of minutes, but numbed by adrenaline, dazed by the danger, we did not think clearly—nobody had matches. Mahir was sent to fetch some while we waited in our hiding space, our courage draining by the moment.

Within a few minutes, Djordje became antsy and decided to go look for Mahir. I knew then that he would not come back, but I said nothing. Vampir and I slouched in silence, waiting for the time to pass so we could propose retreat. But then we heard the barrack floor creaking; the Guard stepped out, and stretched his arms toward the setting sun, roaring with a yawn. In an instant, he was going to turn around and see us and the cans. Before I could even think of making a move, Vampir darted past him toward the tunnel, and the Guard turned around to face me, as I stood paralyzed with the muddy rifle in my hands. What are you doing here? he asked me.
Geffle creel debbing,
I said.
Vau shetter bei doff. Camman.

It is hard to explain why I was speaking the chewing-gum American to him. Perhaps because I thought, in panic, that if I still pretended to be an American I might convince him that I was a foreigner, that I was there by mistake and therefore innocent, and he would let me go. Or because I was, in fact, an American commando at that moment, thinking—if that is the word—that if I stayed inside my identity he would not be able to reach across the reality gap and punch me in the face, as he did, several times in a row. I put up my rifle against his fist, but he went around it, as I yelped:
Fetch a kalling star and pet it de packet, maike it for it meny dey.
And I kept repeating it, until it turned back into a song, as the Guard was raining blows on my head.

But the singing-under-torture did not help me at all in that moment. I fell to the ground and the Guard now tried to kick me in the head, while I tried to protect it with my arms. I have no doubt he would have killed me if he hadn’t been distracted by a beer bottle flying at him. As he looked up, another one smashed into his forehead and exploded, and a shower of blood poured over me and the Guard fell down on his knees. I thought we had finally killed him. I was overcome with the joy of salvation and survival.

“Your parents did not tell me any of this,” Alma said. I wished she had stopped looking at the little screen.

“They did not know,” I said. “Nobody knew. We were a cabal, as they say, loyal only to each other. I’ve never told this to anybody.”

“I see,” she said. She didn’t seem to have entirely suspended her disbelief.

So I escaped; Vampir saved me. The Guard was not, in fact, killed. While we ran home, he went inside the barrack and found a rag to press against the wound. Some minutes later, from my window, I watched him stagger through the gate, stand in front of it, look up (I ducked), and then heard him howl with pain and fury such as I had never heard before and never would hear again. He was not producing any words; he was inarticulate with rage and helplessness, bellowing like a wounded beast. I was thoroughly terrified, for I knew he would have without any doubt killed me if he could have laid his hands on me at that moment.

It was then, Alma, that the world became a dangerous place for me. Perhaps that is why my parents remember that period fondly—I spent a lot of time with them, seeking, unbeknownst to them, their protection. At the end of that summer, we went to the seaside for vacation and I obeyed the infamous whistle. When school started, for months I was afraid to leave our home alone, and they had to walk me to school and back. I returned to their fold; I returned home after the war.

And while Alma was glancing at the camera, I realized that pretty soon, my mother and my father would die and that, even though it had been long since they had protected me from anything, I would be left alone and exposed to the world, devoid of home and love, left alone to confront all the people full of pain and anger. I thought of the day way back in grammar school when I had gone to wet the chalkboard sponge, and in the empty hallway there stood my parents, looking for a teacher’s room. Usually, only one of them would come for a conference with a teacher, but this time, they were together; I seem to remember them holding hands. They looked big in comparison with all the little lockers, the children’s shoes lined up; they grinned when they saw me, proud of me clutching a sponge, performing duties. I felt that the three of us were together; we were inside, and everyone else—the kids in the classrooms, the teachers—was outside. They kissed me; I went back to my classroom; they went to wait for the teacher.