A HIERARCHY OF THINGS
Under Pressure
1.
They’ve brought us to the frontline. Mud and fog everywhere. I can barely see the man in front of me. We almost hold onto each other’s belts lest we get lost. We pass between burning houses. The file trudges on alongside rickety fences. The mud sticks to our boots, stretches like dough. Lines seen for the first time are the best. Everything is new, unusual and hairy as fuck. Especially when you take charge of a position at night, and the next day, in daylight, you realise you’re sitting on the tip of a nail.
Charred beams are falling off roofs, sizzling in the mud. We trudge up a big slope. The grass is slimy with fog. Whenever someone falls, he brings the file to a halt and, as a matter of course, curses a blue streak at the motherland and the president. The very thought that we would sleep out in the open flares up my haemorrhoids. The guide, a military policeman, brings us up to the top of the hump. Emir and I take a shallow trench in which we find: a mattress and a quilt, mud-smeared, and a few fags, smoked down to the filter, nervously stuck into the soil.
‘Alright, lads! Freezin’, innit?’ a voice reaches us from the right-hand side.
‘Come ’ere and we’ll talk,’ replies Emir lying on the mattress.
A silhouette approaches from behind.
Hops into the trench.
‘I’m from the third battalion,’ he tells us as we shake hands.
‘Got a fag?’
I open a cigarette case full of Gales.
‘Ain’t they gonna see us if we smoke?’ asks Emir.
‘Nah. They’re far from ’ere, and the fog’s thick.’
Emir and I both light up, as if on command.
‘Now then, what’s the lie of the land?’ I ask. ‘Is it ’airy?
‘They ploughed the hill with shells earlier today. A fighter from the second company ’ad ’is cheek blown off by shrapnel. On Metla, a hump twice the size of ours, they ’ave a couple of ZiS anti-tank guns. They can shoot us like clay pigeons,’ Third Bat-Boyo recounts slowly.
‘So, survivors will eat with golden spoons, just like the president promised,’ heckles Emir.
‘Ain’t as bad as it looks,’ Third Bat-Boyo comforts him. ‘Gotta die someday any road’.
Fear creeps into me like mould. It’s shrapnel shave day tomorrow.
* * *
‘Your life line is broken in two places. You’ll be wounded twice, once severely,’ a Gipsy woman told me on one occasion. Dževada tossed the beans, read them, concluded:
‘A journey abroad is in your future, and glad tidings from afar.’
She’d tell that to everyone, since we were surrounded from all sides, and we wanted to escape the siege, that is, to travel abroad. “Glad tidings from afar,” that would usually mean a girlfriend who happened to be outside the noose when the siege started, or relatives who lived in Germany and sent money.
I’ve laid down a hierarchy of things:
war
alcohol
poetry
love
war again
Favourite ditty: Bed, you wonderful device, sleeping in you feels so nice.
Stupidest quote:War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it, Erasmus of Rotterdam.
Favourite colour: Blue, all shades of.
Favourite book:Plexus by Henry Miller.
Favourite beverage: Home-distilledrakia.
Favourite weapon: Hungarian Kalashnikov, ser. no. SV3059.
Favourite dish: A bottle of rakia and a packet of fags.
Favourite quote:To become immortal, and then die, Jean-Pierre Melville.
Unfulfilled wish: For shrapnel to scar my face, so I look like a badass when I walk into a bar.
Then I fell asleep under the muddy quilt.
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