Diary of Interrupted Days (8 page)

Johnny had an idea where they were. When he was in high school, he had played at a festival where he met a girl with whom he’d had a brief long-distance relationship. She lived in Beli Manastir, a small town that had to be nearby. That meant they were in a pocket close to the Hungarian border. He tried to remember if he had heard something
about the fighting in this area. Perhaps it was true what Pap had said, that they were here only for security.

He found a spot at the edge of the clearing, behind a birch tree, and soon fell asleep again.

He woke up around noon to the cawing of a crow in the tree above him. As soon as he moved it flew away. He tried to remember where he was, and why, and found a wobbly answer for the first question only. Some of his platoon were awake, sitting around in small groups. There were new people among them, all dressed in black uniforms, all cleanly shaven with military haircuts, and Kalashnikovs. Some special unit. Then he noticed that some of them wore sneakers. Some had bandanas. Paramilitaries?

Johnny got up, stretched, brushed the leaves off his uniform, and went to the shack. He knocked.

“Come in!” barked a voice from behind the door.

Pap was sitting at the table in the corner. One of the sergeants was making coffee on a small burner, and the other was cleaning his gun. A fourth man was sitting with Pap at the table. He wore battle fatigues and had black aviator sunglasses on the top of his head. He looked vaguely familiar.

“Hello, gentlemen,” Johnny said. One of the sergeants nodded in his direction.

“I wanted to talk to you, Captain,” Johnny said to Pap.

“What about?”

“It’s private.”

“There is not much privacy in war, I’m afraid,” Pap said.

“I am—”

“I know who you are.”

Johnny remained silent.

“You are here by mistake. Or, wait, perhaps we were not allowed to bring you here?” Pap waited for Johnny to nod, and when he did not, the captain’s face relaxed slightly. “Would you like a coffee, Johnny? Come, join us.”

Pap pushed a chair over with his boot, and Johnny took it. He waited to be introduced, but Pap had no such intention. A sergeant brought the coffee to their table and poured it into three metal cups. There was a long silence.

“I’ve seen a few new people outside,” Johnny said.

“Locals. We’re here to help them.”

Silence.

“What’s the time, artist?” Pap said.

“I don’t have a watch, Captain.”

“Forgot it at home when you went to war. I see.”

“I never went to war.”

“Don’t get entangled in nuances. The war came to you, as it did to us. It always does. So, if I order you to commence firing at sixteen hundred, when will you start shooting, artist?”

“One second after someone with a watch.”

One of the sergeants laughed. The captain said, “Boys, leave us alone,” and they did, the door slamming behind them. The other man stayed where he was.

“So, what is your problem, then?”

“Well,” Johnny said, “I was drafted for the exercise. The draft said five days. It didn’t say anything about a week and there was definitely nothing about the war. In which, by the way, Serbia is not taking part. I mean—wouldn’t it be dangerous if someone from the foreign media were to learn about us being here?”

Pap looked straight into Johnny’s eyes, but Johnny was accustomed to people looking at him. He also knew that avoiding the captain’s sniper stare would mean submission. Not to this man. His basic strategy had been to get some sense of whoever was running this show, and then get away from here as fast as he could. There was not much left of his plan.

“Ah,” the captain finally said, “you got me there. I told you to avoid nuances but they are important, of course. It’s true that Serbia is not at war with anyone. But you are not in the Serbian army, are you? We are the Yugoslav People’s Army and this is still Yugoslavia until the politicians decide it’s not. We can have our exercises wherever we please, including the combat zone. And we can exercise with live ammunition to our heart’s content. So we’re legit here. Regarding the foreigners, who cares what they think? It’s our country that’s falling apart, not theirs.”

Johnny waited a few seconds for him to go on, and when he didn’t, he said, “There were rather large protests against the war in Belgrade just recently. I took part in them. Am I being punished for that?”

The third man got up. “I’ll be back later, Captain,” he said, “after you put the babies to sleep.”

Johnny stared after him as he left.

Pap took a notebook out of his leather officer bag. “It’s good that you didn’t get into an argument with him.”

Johnny felt a change in Pap’s tone.

“His face seemed familiar.”

“To you, Interpol, and several tens of dead men.”

“Ah,” Johnny said. “The Candyman.”

“The men outside, they are his private army. They call themselves the Black Lions. Actually, they seem to be the advance guard. He’s just told me they have around sixty more fighters coming tomorrow and three tanks. They’ve got Uzis, they’ve got Magnums, and they have a few cannons available. They’ve got more than I do.”

“What do you think my chances are of getting out of here?” Johnny said.

“Right now, none. Stay put and keep a low profile. This is apparently getting out of control—that’s what the Candyman’s arrival means. Our secret service has employed criminals for decades, and now it’s payback time. They must have opened the prisons and let the worst out.”

Johnny looked at him. Was he afraid of the gangster?

“Would you like a drink?” Pap asked.

“Why not?”

The captain poured two shots and pushed one towards Johnny, then raised his, waiting for Johnny to do the same.

“Cheers,” he said, “and may we survive this shit.”

Johnny was suddenly aware of birdsong outside the cabin walls. It was not pleasant, sounding more like short screams, but anything was better than gunshots.

“Make no mistake, artist: I, too, don’t want to be here. I know, I am a professional soldier, I chose this uniform, but those were different times: brotherhood and unity. Then this started. My colleagues chose their sides fast. I am where I am because my parents were Serbs. There is no choice in that.”

Johnny drank a little from his glass. The brandy was strong and sharp, probably made that same year. The captain lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

“I once fucked a girl in Zagreb when I was serving there. She was ugly but she was a nymphomaniac so what the hell. Ideal for a soldier. We were next to a yard gate and when she bent over, I could see a tattoo on her lower back. The letters were old German, hard to read. Small print, three lines. Had someone passed by, he would have seen us, screwing like dogs at the gate, but it still took me an hour to come. Well, maybe I had a cheap watch, but it was the best fuck of my life. You know why it took me that long? Because I kept trying to read the tattoo. See? At first, I thought it was so kind of her to have something for people to read while they were fucking her. Years later I realized it was her neat little trick to squeeze the best out of her riders. How is that related to this now? This uniform on us, my friend, is the tattoo on our asses. Think about it. Lay low, and stay low.”

Johnny’s hand was already on the latch when Pap waved at him to wait. He opened a drawer in the desk, pulled out a watch, and threw it to him. “Here. You never know. Keep it, I have more here. They are a gift from the Candyman for our boys.”

Johnny looked at the watch. It was a Rolex. He looked at Pap.

“No blood on them. They are from a truck that was parked on the wrong side of the road somewhere in Austria, I’m told.”

Johnny went outside to sit under his birch tree again. Not noticing a root hidden in the leaves, he tripped over it and fell. He cursed, rolled over, and decided to stay where he was. He looked at the sky. It was low and claustrophobic.
The flatlands in the distance were his country, which he and others like him wanted to keep together, but he felt only coldness coming from there. He didn’t want to die fighting for this place.

He tried to block the wisps of quiet conversation drifting towards him. He thought of Sara … She was probably trying to find him, trying to do something about his being here. And Boris—he must be accusing himself now, as he always did. He was desperate when he returned from meeting his father. But he’d be there for Sara—she could count on him.

After a while, the wind seemed to carry all the sound away. And then, just as his eyes were closing, he was certain he could actually hear the silence. It was dark, and gentle, and it fell in flakes, like black snow. A thought accompanied him into the blackness: my whole world is freezing now.

More people joined the camp, some of them in civilian clothes and without any visible arms, some of them apparently Black Lions. They moved to an abandoned socks factory, which—in spite of the broken windows and the stink of bird droppings—gave them much better protection than the few tents they’d had in the clearing. Someone had even fixed the water so they could use the showers and toilets, though there was no electricity.

Johnny was grateful when Pap gave him a spare notebook and a pencil. He started jotting down fragments of conversation,
a verse here and there, some notes. He’d had music in his head as far back as he could remember. It was fully orchestrated and grandiose when he was happy, edgy and fragmented when he felt bad. Now all he heard was the echo of his shredded thoughts. Perhaps it was time to write a book. He had wanted to write one for the past—how long? Six years? Eight? At first he thought that maybe he would write a memoir but realized that too much had happened to him—his memories were overgrown and dense, like jungle. Once, during a dinner party, he had sat next to a well-known writer and confessed his desire. “Of course you want to write a book,” the writer said. “And I dream of making a record. We all want to jump out of our skins, but in the end only a few do it.”

Definitely, this was a great time to jump out of his skin. The only good thing about sitting here in the backwoods was that the notion of war had thinned out. Weapons and uniforms, trucks and orders—yes, all that, but other things too: listening to the wind and the murmur of dry leaves, watching the endless movie of the clouds, engaging in the small talk, the crude jokes, or escaping it all in his thoughts. How long had it been? Johnny had to count the days. More than a week for sure. Ten days? Eleven? It was December.

The drizzle that had come in short intervals all morning stopped and an easterly wind picked up. When the sun appeared, people crawled out from the factory to warm their bones.

Johnny stayed inside, writing. The even rhythm of his hand and the slow dripping of thoughts lulled him to sleep.
He woke up with a strong erection. He could not recall anything from his dreams and the stubbornness in his crotch surprised him. His first thought, almost automatic, was that he had dreamt of fucking with Sara, but there was no way of being certain about it.

He used to be good at remembering his dreams. Several times, the scenes he had dreamt were so powerful that he felt compelled to write songs about them. There had been a dream behind “Angel of Revenge.” In that one, a woman with beautiful lips—who was his lover, his mother, his sister, and himself—told him of the injustice done to her by a group of soldiers guarding the gate to her house. He had felt terrible anger, and had killed them all with his bare hands. When he was finished with the last one, she came over to him, touched his eyebrow, raising it, and said, “I am your destiny now. You can fuck me.”

But he hadn’t been able to remember his dreams since they’d brought him here—as if the contrast between the world of dreams and the reality around him was so big that it evaporated the fine tissue. As if the dreams needed a softer landing than he could afford them now.

He was headed towards the bathroom when some soldiers came back in talking loudly.

“Something is going on outside,” one of them said. “About thirty people in brand-new fatigues arrived with several Jeeps, one with a heavy machine gun mounted on it. The Candyman got out of that one and went to see the captain. They’re distributing food outside. Go while there’s still good stuff.”

Johnny went outside and stood in line. Someone ahead of
him said that an order had been given to get ready to move after sunset.

“Finally, some action,” said one of the paramilitaries, a broad-shouldered man in his mid-twenties who sat next to Johnny after they got their food. He wore a red bandana and green sunglasses and introduced himself as Black.

“Johnny, how come you’re with us?” Black asked.

“I was brought here with the others,” Johnny said, “like cattle, on a truck.”

“Thought so. I watched the concert in the square.”

Johnny turned to him. “Then how come you’re here?”

Black didn’t answer.

The rain started suddenly as if it had been ordered to do so. The two of them moved farther back under the bush and continued to cut off and chew on pieces of smoked meat.

“Black,” Johnny said after a while, “have you already—?”

“Been in combat? Yeah. Good stuff, if you’re the right man. Like nothing else. I personally think I’m a better man because of it. When it starts, you are transparent to yourself. You have nothing to lean on, except a bullet. It clears your head.”

“But shooting at other people …”

“There’s not much to it. Nothing personal. You and the guy who’s shooting at you—you are just men at work.”

He looked at Johnny, pursed his lips. “If you mean what you say in your songs, you should be okay.”

Johnny thought for a while. “I’m not sure about one B-side.”

Black laughed.

“Seriously, how did you get here?” Johnny asked.

“I volunteered. I was a graphic designer in Belgrade. My grandfather, on my mother’s side, was from this area. As a kid, I used to spend my summers here. When this mess started, I thought, Who gives you the right to fuck with my childhood? So I decided to come. My old man is a retired soldier. He tried to keep me from doing this but when he realized I was serious, he said, ‘Find the most experienced commander.’ I asked around, and heard that the Candyman was gathering his troops. Only two other Lions besides me have never been in jail.”