I spend a lot of time watching for people down in the city. The few to be seen scurry everywhere. They’re like rats. They’re caught in a trap, so I guess that’s an accurate simile. They run across intersections, dart from one parked car to the next, and burrow into doorways.
Some of them even skulk behind the armoured vehicles of the UN when crossing intersections. These are driven slowly from one side of an intersection to the other while small crowds of pedestrians huddle behind them, like pilot fish around a shark. How’s a sniper supposed to deal with that? Not only is it unreasonable, I think it’s unsporting.
I realise the people act like this because of me, even though I’ve hardly fired a shot. They’re darting around like rats because I’m inside their heads. I’m infiltrating the minds of an entire city. It’s a psychological game. I’ve worked that out already – a mind game pure and simple. It is like the Chinese proverb: ‘Kill one man, terrorise a thousand.’ They knew what they were talking about, those Chinese. They were saying, people don’t like to gamble with a sniper. With an artillery piece they’re willing to gamble, but not with a sniper. A sniper is too selective, his victims singled out, the elements of chance all but eliminated.
But this new career of mine (which I must remember to tell the school’s Career Advisory Board about on my return to London) isn’t exactly easy. I thought it would be much easier. Sometimes I barely glimpse a figure – looking like a hunchbacked dwarf or deformed cripple – as it springs into view from behind a building, dives into a doorway, or jumps up from beside a parked car and sprints around a corner. By the time it’s registered in my brain, the person has gone, the opportunity has been missed. I haven’t yet worked out the solution. Perhaps I should keep my rifle trained on one spot and hope that someone will eventually appear there, either wander across my line of fire or simply stand and wait to be transformed into a colander. It seems a haphazard way to operate, with too much left to chance and the likelihood I’ll end up dying myself – from boredom.
Once or twice, just so I won’t be forced to return home and tell my father I scarcely fired a shot, I let off a round into the city – often at this lamp post which stands, defiant in its loneliness, on the corner of two main roads near the National Museum. It’s famous. Santo says it can be seen from many of the mountain slopes around Sarajevo, and only from the east is it completely blocked from view by a building. For this reason it’s used as a target by snipers: the perfect way to adjust one’s sights at the start of the day before moving on to human targets. The lamp post is chipped, marked and scarred up its entire length, from the fancy crossbar at the top, to the broad, ornate base which widens out just above the pavement. It reminds me, in its solitariness, of the lamp post in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when the children have pushed their way through the clothes in the cupboard and reached snow-covered Narnia. I almost expect to see the White Witch in the centre of Sarajevo riding by on her sledge, wrapped in furs and eating Turkish delight. I imagine shooting her, a character in a novel, fictitious, the child of C.S. Lewis, and watching the blood spread, blossoming across her white cape before dripping down onto the snow. It’s obvious I can shoot people in my head, that’s easy enough. No problems there.