Miljenko Jergovic - Sarajevo Marlboro

D— is the only Serbian village near the Muslim town of Zenica, but this fact only became relevant when the Yugoslav National Army began withdrawing from the area. The villagers were then given numerous cannons, rifles and machine-guns — at least three guns per inhabitant. They were instructed to defend their homes and told that the army would remain nearby to help out. They even appointed a village commander or “duke” — Musa. He appeared in front of the villagers, wearing a number of cartridge belts and a traditional black fur hat with a Serbian cockade. Some of his neighbors were still terrified of the madman, but there were others who looked at him with a new glimmer in their eyes. Zenica lay sleepily below in the valley, somehow tempting the villagers to shell it as a way of proving themselves to Musa after years of being afraid to look him in the eye.

For ten days Musa didn’t sober up or leave the headquarters, which were located in an old shop. The guards at the entrance were regularly changed, and the Duke appointed, then canned, a new deputy every morning. At daybreak he always summoned the deputy he had appointed twenty-four hours earlier and the person who was due to replace him. Both men would stand to attention in front of the Duke, staring at the top button of his military coat.

“You imbecile.” he always began, addressing the first subordinate. “Did you know, imbecile, that I could skin you alive?”

“Yes, I did,” the unfortunate deputy would reply, causing the Duke to jump out of his chair and punch the man in the teeth with a mighty blow.

“You’re an imbecile and you don’t know anything until I tell you!” he’d bawl.

The following day the next soon-to-be ex-deputy would perhaps try the other tack, answering, “No, I didn’t,” to the same question not that it would make any difference — he’d receive a blow just the same.

“If you didn’t know, imbecile, whether or not I could skin you alive, how dare you come before me?”

If the people of Zenica had not decided to capture D—, obliging the Duke to sober up finally, it is more than likely that, sooner or later, the entire male population would have served as his deputy, being patted on the back one day, and the next with a mouth full of blood.

D— came under fire from rifles and hunting guns, and the occasional mortar bomb. Duke Musa gave the attackers an ultimatum: either they withdraw or he would raze Zenica to the ground. They stopped firing, and Musa went back to drinking. One night he ransacked the headquarters and tore off the guard’s ear. He gave orders to the villagers not to shoot without his command, and it didn’t occur to anyone not to obey.

The villagers were equally fearful of Musa and the people from Zenica. But they firmly believed that when Musa gave the word, Zenica would simply disappear. If his own neighbors were so afraid of him, they reckoned, the Muslims and Croats must be shitting themselves.

The inhabitants of Zenica, however, were rather confused by Musa’s behavior. He declined to open fire — but he also refused to negotiate. Whenever the military command in Zenica tried to make contact with D—, hoping to persuade the villagers to surrender peacefully, the Duke would scream down the telephone line, swearing and cursing so terribly that the blood would freeze in their veins. You couldn’t talk to him or threaten him or try to bribe him with a few thousand Deutschmarks to surrender D— and go his own way. In any case, his curses were not just empty words: it was hellfire and brimstone, as if somebody had opened the gates of the underworld. Here was evil for its own sake, unwilling to compromise, impossible to deceive, a malevolence to which it was unwise to submit, because it wanted nothing and expected less.

The attack on D— village finally began a month later. This time it was decided not to pay any attention to Musa’s threats — it was time to go the whole hog. The grip was being tightened, Musa howled. People died with guns in their hands, but they were not allowed to shell Zenica. Nobody could understand what sort of idée fixe had taken hold of the Duke, but it was still preferable to die from a bullet wound than to ask the wrong questions and thus become a victim of Musa’s wrath.

On the third day of attack the Duke nevertheless fired three cannons at the town, but he forgot (or omitted) to activate them. The cannon-balls happily bounced along the streets of Zenica and then quietly came to rest. That night Musa assembled all the men in the village and threatened to rip their heads off unless they immediately brought all their weapons to the headquarters. He then phoned the commanders in Zenica and invited them to enter D— the following day at noon.

Everybody heard the gunshot, but none of the villagers were brave enough to enter the headquarters without Musa’s permission. At midday the troops from Zenica passed through the village and opened the door to find the Duke lying on the floor, with a bullet hole in his temple, a bottle of brandy in his left hand and a picture of St. Sava, the patron saint of Serbia, in his right. The villagers were still afraid of him, even though he was dead, so they whispered to the soldiers from Zenica that they were not Chetniks and that the Yugoslav National Army had forced them to take the weapons. Nobody, however, understood why Musa had refused to fire on Zenica.

No other place has threats and curses like the ones in Bosnia. They have been dreamed up over a long period of time, not in order to hurt or scare anybody, but to prove the value of imagination. The best curses and threats chart the development of a particular culture. For example, with the electrification of Bosnian villages came the following curse: “May your child be cut up with a chainsaw and stored in the cellar for winter!”

Salih F. saw with his own eyes his wife and two daughters being cut up with an electric saw by the Chetniks. Later imprisoned in Manjača, he was expected to die there, but instead he was released in exchange for some other prisoners. He was transferred to Gradiška, then to Karlovac and finally to the Czech Republic, where he ended up in a refugee camp among unknown, but mostly Bosnian, people. Illiterate and a bit slow, he was the ideal figure of fun. Salih F. spent days trying not to rise to the bait. Sometimes he made the effort to come up with a quick retort or to think of an original reply, but it didn’t really work. He only ended up looking even more stupid than before. It was as though he had been dropped into a machine for mincing his nerves. The only way to escape was to put the heat on the next sucker, or else to sort it out with his fists.

One day Salih F. fought with half the camp. He had the shit beaten out of him, at first by the Bosnians and then by the Czech police guards. Afterwards, still bleeding and now tied up, he was presented with an official order banning him from all the refugee camps in the country. He packed up his things, swore at the Bosnians and the Czech guards and set off for Prague. After walking over fifty miles, he entered the city in triumph and was immediately arrested. He had no documents in his pockets except for the banning order.

The police threw Salih F. into prison, but after keeping him locked up for a night, they couldn’t think what to do with him. They wanted to expel the vagrant, but no country would take a Bosnian who was prone to fighting. The most straightforward thing to do would have been to send him back to Manjača, but this was impossible in practice, because such a move would have contravened the international declaration of human rights.

In the end the problem was solved by a quick-witted bureaucrat from the Bosnian embassy in Prague. He recommended that the police dispatch Salih F. to a psychiatric hospital to be pronounced insane. That way, he couldn’t be expelled from the country — it was again a matter of human rights. After listening to the prisoner’s life story, the authorities decided that the psychiatric option was really quite a good idea.