Dragan

~2003, a year after the disappearance

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She hated thinking about the price of flour, about relatives and neighbors. She was crazy, let’s be clear about that. One night she cried. It had been like that for some time already. She told me she wanted to feel, to really hear music. To really see colors. She could be crazy like that sometimes. I approved, as I had to, because I myself was a poet. But in me there had never been such defiance, such fury. I felt that I could really hear music.

We brought her home from the hospital, and she was still drugged from painkillers. I remember Hendrix playing in the car, the song Third Stone from the Sun. There was a look in her eyes, as if she were very far away, far away, but also a kind of peace, as if she were finally home. At that moment I was afraid, and I felt a strange longing for her, already woven through with a grey melancholy. That night her hunger was terrible. She wanted me, wanted me to want her. She probably wanted to feel something again, to really feel me, like that song.

And while I was inside her, and felt that I could lick from her sweat the feeling that I’m invincible, magnificent and strong... already in the next moment... somehow it became clear to me.

A provincial poet is not the king of the universe. Her life revolved around some kind of black hole, an irresistible center of her thoughts and desires, invisible to me and to everyone else. And I suppose for a while I thought my poetry, my sweet deviations, my tame madness, were part of that black hole. In my wildest moments I thought I was her black hole. But in that moment, somehow, I already knew.

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That was more or less a year before she disappeared.

And what is a person to do when life consists of places you are no longer allowed to visit? When you can’t trust either the desire to remember or the desire to forget?

Sometimes I am so angry with her. If only I had never met her. Sometimes I imagine her, humiliated by life, working in some office, stamping papers.

Next – approved. (BAM)

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Please, do not unbutton your shirt while at work, Mr. Jarni, that is truly inappropriate. (BAM)

I can’t, ma’am, but thank you for the invitation, I’m currently on a diet. Enjoy your meal. (BAM)

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It is truly impossible to approve such a request directly here; you will have to go to the office on the fourth floor and submit an application for reconsideration. (BAM)

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I smile maliciously when I imagine this. But then she appears beside me again, with her most malicious smile, and again, curse her, she enjoys the joke as if it were shared. As if I hadn’t invented it just to get rid of her. And again I am back at the beginning, and again I love her. Again she is my closest friend, and my only demanding lover. My cursed black hole.

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Svemir

~1900, the First Balkan War, great-grandfather

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Yesterday they brought us ammunition. Waiting again. My comrades are strangers to me. I cleaned my Nagant (Nagant M1895), Nene as we affectionately called it, and loaded it with bullets. I will fill those seven chambers, and turn them into seven completely different holes.

The time we live here in the barracks does not belong to us. It belongs to our children, if they are lucky. It belongs to their children. Last night I slept badly. Marija was coughing. I think I saw blood on her pillow. Tuberculosis. Jakša gives her rakija when he thinks we’re not looking. I pretend not to see. He’s right. It’s not my business.

Last night I slept badly again, dreamed evil dreams again. But something was different. As usual, I dreamed of Bosnian mountains and minefields. But this time I saw a girl walking freely through a minefield. She was beautiful, the way women can only be beautiful in dreams. No worries on her forehead. I shouted at her to stop, not to go further, that she would die. She turned around, and her eyes were completely white, without irises, without pupils. She smiled and said: But Uncle Svemir, I am already gone. Then she continued walking through the minefield.

I woke up with tears in my eyes. I am already gone. That’s how it is for all of us here in the barracks. We are already gone. In a way, I feel I am in the best company there is: the company of people who have discovered that the future is still worth more than a rotten bean.

They didn’t send us to school. We weren’t at parties where people shake hands and show their teeth in smiles. Our tool of change is the Nagant. And the holes we will make with it.