I Hate Martin Amis et al. (7 page)

‘I think you need to face up to reality, Milan. You know how hard it is to get published nowadays, you've told me so yourself. I don't mind if you keep trying, if that's what you want, but I think you should get a proper job as well.'

It's true my writing career path to date has followed a perfectly straight, perfectly horizontal line that has resisted every temptation to deviate towards the vertical. It's flatter than a dead man's electroencephalogram. The struggles I've had, the self-sacrifices I've made, the agonies I've endured, have been for what? Where's my reward? I've written thousands of words, hundreds of thousands of words that only I have ever read. An audience of one is all I've ever managed to rustle up, an audience of one – and that's me. There has been no crowd of admirers, no gathering, no group, not even a couple. We are talking here about the onanistic ravings of the self-deluded, the scream in the middle of the night ignored by all and sundry. We are talking about my story, my interpretation of Life, the information I wish to impart –
my
information – not raising the slightest flicker of interest from anyone. It makes me sick. I am hollow, empty inside, and yet I want to vomit. Killing Mulqueeny, I thought as I sat in the park, would definitely give me some relief.

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I
nstead of going back to the Grbavica apartment, I decided to try somewhere new. I want to get away from Nikola. Also, staying in one place for too long makes it too easy for the enemy to pinpoint your position.

Mladic has declared that we're allowed to enter any house or apartment in the suburb at will. The owners are forbidden to lock their doors. And our soldiers can also help themselves to any food and drink, articles of clothing or family heirlooms they happen to find. If they want to set up a sniping post in the front room they can do that too, despite the fact it will place the family in considerable danger. Being a bit of a believer in ‘an Englishman's castle' and that kind of thing, I prefer to search out an empty apartment for myself. There are plenty of them around.

My new apartment (that has a certain ring to it) isn't far from the camp, which is south of here, about a thousand feet higher up and on the other side of the Pale road. I weigh up spending the night alone or sitting beside a fire with the others. Already I'm tired of their inanities, their shallow posturing and thoughtless patriotism. Sometimes it's preferable to be alone. So long as I bring sufficient food with me, I'm quite comfortable (I have a good sleeping bag). No one seems to be interested in, nor care where I spend the night, which makes me wonder, should I be killed, how long it will take before someone realises I'm missing. I eat tinned food, mainly – available from the canteen. It's not unpleasant. There's a stove in the kitchen, but of course the gas has long since been disconnected or, more likely, the supply station has been bombed out of existence. The same is true of the water, which I have to collect from outside every morning. When I first arrived here, I could fill my container with snow from the drifts still piled against the walls of the apartment blocks and melt it over a kerosene camp stove. Now the snow in Grbavica has all but disappeared.

The surrounding streets remind me of home. The apartments are dilapidated and rundown, like council flats, the only difference being that London buildings aren't usually riddled with bullet holes. I imagine I can hear the conversations of the previous inhabitants on the stairs, the shouting of the kids, the slamming of doors, the raised voices and the laughter. Where are they now, these ghosts? Where did they flee to? If still alive, they could be imagining me moving between the walls they'd once called their own. I half expect them to walk through the front door and say, ‘Excuse me, this is our apartment, would you mind leaving, please?' Then I'd be forced to shoot them. I wouldn't be keen to move, that's for sure.

Already I'm becoming used to the continual bombardment, the sounds of traffic and factories in any normal city replaced here by gunfire. It never stops throughout the daylight hours. Cannons boom in the surrounding hills, and when the shells explode in the streets below, everything shakes, even the ground on my side of the river. This shaking must do more damage to people's heads than the shells themselves. It must wear them down. There's also the hammering of machine guns and the whistle of artillery shells flying overhead, both punctuated by the flat crack of rifle fire from the snipers ringing the city. I always hear the report first. It can be from the mountains behind me, or in front, or to one of the sides. The city is surrounded by mountains – it nestles.

We all watch and wait, those in and around the city, each wondering if a particular missile has our name on it. That's an interesting expression: this missile
has your name on it
. John Smith, Flat 3, 54 Elm Walk. Who decides which name goes on the missile, then addresses it, writing the name and address neatly on the cone before posting it? God, is He the addressor? The waiting doesn't take long in reality, before a building in the city erupts in smoke and dust, exploding with varying degrees of impressiveness, flames sometimes shooting skywards moments later.

After advice from Santo, I now have a balaclava, a black one, which I stuff daily with an article of clothing, affix a pair of dark glasses to, and then, with a small forked stick I keep specially for the purpose, slowly raise a few inches above the window ledge. I call this ‘head' after the headmaster who made my job as a school janitor so miserable. My feelings towards Mr Gilhooley are ambivalent. While wishing someone would put a bullet through his cotton-filled brain because of the way his namesake treated me, I also appreciate the fine job he's doing on my behalf. Because of this, I hope and pray he'll not be spotted.

‘Come on, Gilhooley,' I say as I expose him slowly to the enemy, ‘let me know what you can see out there.' It has to be admitted that he volunteers for this dangerous work without hesitation, and I have nothing but admiration for the way in which he conducts himself. He is both selfless and patriotic, never once complaining or requesting a change of duties. So far he's been fortunate: no one has taken a shot at him. When I eventually lower him back onto the floor, uninjured, and take his place, I can almost hear him give a sigh of relief. Mission accomplished, without mishap.

My days are dominated by two activities: trying to keep warm and trying to shoot people. I wish shooting people was a more strenuous activity. I'm perpetually numb with cold, my hands and face blue. Lying prone on the ground, scarcely moving for most of the day, doesn't help. Although I wear so much clothing I can't imagine a bullet ever penetrating so many layers, some part of my body will still go into cramp on a fairly regular basis. I try to flex my muscles while remaining still. I make minute adjustments to the rear sight to allow for elevation and to the side sight to allow for windage, persuading myself that such tiny movements help to move blood through my veins, even though it's already acquired the consistency of thick syrup. I pray for a target to appear, and it does, every so often. But it's a challenge. We're talking about someone who's usually several hundred yards away, visible only for seconds and, to make it even harder, doubled up and running. It's similar to a funfair shooting gallery: the target pops up and drops back down, or flashes across your line of vision. You don't get much time. You have to be quick, instinctive. And that's what saves me.

I didn't have time to think about shooting my first victim, my first
real
victim. It was a man. He was running across an intersection. I fired. He fell. He didn't move. I didn't either. I remained staring through the sites, stunned. I'd killed someone, and I'd done it without a moment's thought. It could have been a training exercise. I just had time to spin around and spew onto the bare floorboards behind me.

When I turned back, the man lay crumpled on the pavement, face down, one arm reaching out above his head, the other squashed beneath his body, his legs neatly together and quite straight. Electrical activity in his brain must have fizzed and crackled to a halt. His blood was creeping, slow as lava, towards the edge of the pavement. He was dead. I was numb. Time passed.

No one was to be seen. This was scarcely surprising. I've heard sniper victims are often left for hours where they fall, until someone decides an incident happened sufficiently long ago for it to be safe to venture out into the street to retrieve the body. If someone is obviously dead, it does seem pointless risking a sniper's bullet in order to go out and claim a corpse. This is understandable behaviour. Human nature being what it is, this isn't surprising. I wish it were. I'd like to see someone behave in a manner that did surprise me, that made me say, ‘Now, I've never seen anyone behave like that before.' But I can't see it happening. The predictability of human beings is all too predictable.

I lay on my stomach looking down on the scene, again aware of the cold and the taste of vomit in my mouth. I forced myself to lie still. I expected something to happen, but nothing did. I peered through the telescopic sights at a concentrated area, then lowered the Steyr an inch or so and took in the broader view. All remained quiet. Eventually I edged back from my vantage point. When I was out of sight I rolled over and sat up. I was stiff with cold. I couldn't stop shivering. I lit a cigarette, leant against the wall at the back of the room, hugging my knees to my chest, my rifle propped at my side.

And that's how it happened. That was number one. I was no longer a virgin.

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I
told Santo that night back at camp. I'm ashamed to say I felt a little boastful – proud of what I'd achieved, yet guilty at the same time. He insisted on toasting my first kill with several glasses of Slivovitz, and shouting at anyone who'd listen that the Englishman had shot his first Muslim. My back was slapped by many people, including some I'd never seen before. I saw Nikola sitting a few yards away. He didn't congratulate me, just sat and smirked as if he didn't believe a word of it. I ignored him. I watched Santo instead. He'd wrested my rifle off me, placed it across his knees and, with the blade of his knife, was busy scratching a small line, the first one, about half an inch long at the end of the butt. ‘I do it near the base,' he said, ‘because you must leave room for all the others.'

Now that I have number one carved into my rifle – a whitish scar against the green stain of the plastic butt – and supposedly the person who'll always have a special place in my heart, I have become like all the others. I am reassured. Now we are brothers.

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M
ost days there are wounded in the camp. They're passing through, being moved to Pale or, in the more serious cases, to Belgrade. I feel I'm not the only one who doesn't like having them around. Being forced to listen to their moaning, their groans of pain and the way they sometimes scream makes me feel uncomfortable. I prefer the wounded to remain at the far end of my telescopic site, several hundred yards away. Here, they often lie on their camp beds, motionless, as if they're already dead. One of them was being carried past me on a stretcher the other evening, and he suddenly reached out and grabbed my arm. I tried half-heartedly to shake him off, but he clung all the tighter. It was in the middle of a downpour. A bloody bandage was wrapped around the top of his head, and the rain was causing rivulets of blood to run down his face. His eyebrows were arched, his eyes staring and he said something I didn't catch, or couldn't understand. It sounded like a question. He hung onto me, waiting for an answer. The rain was drumming on the canvas that had been thrown across his body, and I stood in the mud, cursing under my breath, wanting to escape. I looked at one of the orderlies carrying the wounded man for help, but he only shrugged. He didn't seem to understand either. I didn't know the answer the wounded man was looking for, so I tore my arm from his grip, almost yanking him off the stretcher and onto the ground, and the stretcher bearers carried him away through the curtain of water. It made me feel sick.

Amongst those who haven't been wounded, there's a definite camaraderie. I think this is because we're all beyond the pale, outside the bounds of civilised society. Having the rest of the world against us brings us closer together. It's certainly something I've always found appealing: having everyone hate us has never bothered me. The truth is, I like that. It makes me more determined than ever to thumb my nose at them. Yes, I like having the whole world against us, and having the opportunity to play the part of the bad guy. None of us cares what they think. Again and again I hear men saying, ‘They can fuck off!' ‘Fuck them!' ‘To hell with that lot!' Sometimes they're talking about the people of Sarajevo, but most of the time they're talking about the UN, the representatives of those on the inside. Although the men were suspicious of me at first, they now believe I've betrayed their enemy, which amounts to virtually everyone else in the world. I've changed sides, or that's how they see it. In their eyes I'm a fellow collaborator.

Often the talk that is carried on in the camp is between two people. It's whispered, like a confession, often earnestly, and can't be heard by anyone else. There's also a lot of grunting. Many of the men will grunt rather than speak. They'll grunt when they take their plates of food off the cook, grunt at the person sitting next to a vacant spot by the fire to find out if it's free, grunt instead of answering yes or no to someone's question.

Is that what they've become, animals living in the forest, grunting, eating, sleeping, fornicating, lying down in the mud, warming themselves by the fire, barely communicating with each other, concentrating solely on the basics, cut off from the world, doing what they're doing for no reason other than that they've been told to do it? By Milosevic, I suppose.

Sometimes there's singing around the campfire. It can be just one man with a guitar, or it can be everyone present. In the main they're folk songs, some of which I recognise from childhood. When everyone sings, an air of maudlin sincerity descends, the men either closing their eyes, lowering them to the ground as if overcome by emotion, or raising them to the pitch-black sky as if seeking an answer to their struggles here on earth. Occasionally they'll dance the kolo, a local dance. I don't join in. They dance in the mud because there's no grass in the campsite. They dance, not in celebration, but in order to give themselves comfort.

The campsite is the focus point for the surrounding area. Old friends greet each other, soldiers who haven't met for awhile clasp hands or shoulders and shout affectionate obscenities at each other, standing eyeball to eyeball. Others sit in silence by the fire, brooding, clasping their bottles of Slivovitz, being consumed by the alcohol and the flames. The crackle and whine of patriotic music on Radio Belgrade fades in and out in the background. A few of the men hunch over the transistor like relatives around a death bed, hoping to catch some final words of wisdom, an explanation for what's happening in their lives. Some information.