William Vollmann - The Atlas

Do you think these people died in great pain? I asked the pathologist. You look at them every day; maybe you know what they know…

He took me into another room. — This young boy lived three days, he said. See how his stomach is open? They say he screamed day and night. But I think he's an exception. My brother was wounded last month by a grenade. I asked him what he felt. He told me that he felt nothing. He was injured very seriously in his arm. He said it was not until later that the pain started. So I believe that most of these people felt nothing.

His words comforted me. When I left the morgue, returning to the not-yet-dead outside the hospital's dusty window-shards like gray scraps of cloth where a man sat flirting with the nurses, his hand-bandage sporting a blaze of autumn, and a smiling girl took the sun with her friends, offering to God her deep scars just under knee and eye; I got back into the car (the militiaman had refused to go in with me because last time when the pathologist raised the sheet on an unidentified body it turned out to be his friend's), I found that the tenderness at the back of my head had gone away. I wasn't afraid of being shot there anymore. I feared only getting my stomach blown open. In general, of course, I remained just as afraid. A week later, when I was standing outside one of the apartment buildings near the front, waiting for my friend Sami to buy vodka, I felt a sharp impact on the crown of my head. Reaching up to explore the wound, I felt wetness. I took a deep breath. I brought my hand down in front of my eyes, preparing myself to see blood. But the liquid was transparent. Eventually I realized that the projectile was merely a peach pit dropped from a fifteenth-floor window.

She sat next to me at the table, utterly trapped in silence while the laughs burst around her like shells. Finally I asked her why she was so unhappy.

It's too difficult to explain, she said.

Try.

You have only a few words. I have only a few words.

So it's not the war, then, I said. I think you were always unhappy.

She leaned toward me. — Yes, she said.

Me too, I said.

She smiled. She laid her pale hand down on my hand. I felt a violent tenderness for her.

Come, she said. I must cook for these people. You can be with me.

As we went out together, the others all shouted with glee at the conquest they were sure I had made. The host, wounded twice since he'd volunteered a month before, was very drunk. His was one of those apartments still intact (or perhaps refurbished by means of that special liquidity which property acquires in wartime), with carpets, glass cabinets and windows (astounding to see them unbroken), fur rugs, and all the Ballantines and vodka you could drink. He had pulled out his pistol in the middle of the party and announced that he would test my bulletproof vest, which I was wearing. His eyes gleamed with desperate laughter and the barrel wavered. — May I finish my drink first? I asked. — I like your style, James Bond! he shouted. He strode to the window and fired three times, roaring. Maybe he killed one of the neighbors and maybe the bullets went nowhere. And I remember how she shivered with sorrow and despair, trembling as the shots went off. — You know, I have a pathological fear, she said to me. I want to go with you, but I cannot. I have a fear of going anywhere. This street is in the center of town. It is one of the worst for snipers. And every morning I must go to work, and I must go to the doctor for my mother. I must always run. And I cannot sleep at night. The sounds of the artillery terrify me. — At that moment I would have died for her if doing that would have helped her, but nothing could help her. So we went to the door together, and the others laughed.

Outside the candle-lit apartment it was night-dark, of course. We felt our way down the two flights of stairs to the landing where the stove was, and she bent over it. — No good, she said. She put my hand on it, and I found that it was cold. Nothing would be cooked today.

So we came back to the party, and the others stared at us. They thought that we must have quarrelled.

She said to me: What I don't understand is why we have to live. Life is nothing but sadness.

But you said you liked music. Don't you have moments of happiness?

Happiness? Oh, yes, in brief flashes. And sadness for yean and years.

What would make you happy?

Not to work. To live entirely alone. But I cannot, because I have no money. And I don't understand why there must be money to live.

How much money would you need to be happy?

I don't know. It's impossible anyway.

A hundred thousand deutsche marks a month?

No, no, that's too much.

How much?

Maybe two hundred.*

A month?

Yes.

So if I gave you two hundred deutsche marks you could be happy for one month?

She smiled for the second time. She thought I was joking, but she liked the joke. — Yes. You are a good man. .

When it was time to go I got out the money and gave it to her. I had to kneel down in front of the single candle in the middle of the room to read the denominations, so everyone was watching me and I could hear their laughter hiss down eerily into nothingness. The shadow of my hand and of the bills trembled monstrous on the sniper curtain. It smeared their faces with darkness.

She wouldn't take it. — You understand nothing, she kept saying. Please, please.

So I understand nothing, I said. Take it. I can live without it.

No, no. Please.

Finally I gave up. But as I went out, preparing to descend with the other guests those cold and utterly dark flights of stairs, remembering the rotten bannister at the bottom and then the terrible danger when we had to open the front door and run out into the open street; as the militiaman shouted in rage and pain because he'd gotten drunk and done something to break open the wound in his arm where the bullet still lay grinding against the bone and which was now bleeding through his sleeve; as the host called to me, laughing: She wants to kiss you, James!; as the driver slipped a round into the chamber of his gun; as the women tucked up their dresses so that they could run, she came to me and squeezed my hand.

* In 1992, 200 DM would have been about U.S. $120.

Whenever I could find a phone that was working, I tried to call the woman who had said that things were too difficult to explain, but I never got through. Finally I reached her on the night before I was going to leave Sarajevo.

Are you all right? she said. That was how everyone seemed to greet each other.

A little shrapnel in my hand, but I wasn't hurt. And you?

A grenade came into our neighbor's house, she said quietly. It was dreadful.

But you, you're all right?

Yes.

We didn't say anything to each other for a moment, and then I said: I'm probably leaving tomorrow. The BBC said I could ride along in their armored car. I guess it depends on whether the road to Kisjeliak is safe.

I don't think there was a silence after I had said that, but my guilt about being free to leave has built a silence over time that drowned whatever she actually said. Every day I'd have liked to call her and ask: Are you still alive? Are you all right? But of course no one could call Sarajevo.

Bleeding brackish droplets which his skin had borrowed from the artificial lagoon, he parted from his wife, she bound for sun, he for shade. They had not seen the giant turtles. He was almost dry now. His towel was stretched out beside the farthest boat. Before lying down he made certain that his watch had not been stolen. He had never had anything stolen at the beach but he continually expected something bad to happen. Coddling his little unhatched egg of anxiety, he could not see or think of anything else until he had done this. His wife had once bought him a very expensive watch which had been stolen in a hotel. The watch he had now was not expensive, so his vigilance must be some irrelevant suffix of guilt. Anyhow it had not been stolen. He lay comfortably alone. Then he noticed that a Japanese girl had pitched her chair next to him. She too was a subject of the shade kingdom, it seemed. Her husband lay on his belly in the sunny sand, twenty feet away. The girl wore a black bathing suit. She had long slender pale arms, thighs as slender as bones.