Earlier this evening, I was sitting by the campfire writing my journal, when Stevan joined me. This man is not like other people. A normal person will walk up and sit down next to you, or approach with a smile and a cheerful greeting, but Stevan’s much too sly for that. He likes to circle his prey, waiting for the opportunity to sidle up unseen. My guess is that his suspicious nature makes him worry that exposing himself to view too soon may mean his overtures (the most repressed overtures I’ve ever witnessed) will be repulsed before he has a chance to put them in motion. Instead, he lopes around his prey trying to look as if he has other things on his mind, as if he has absolutely no desire to sit down next to you and chat. And then, when you’re least expecting it, he swoops.
He sat hunched up next to me, almost lying forward on his knees, taking quick, furtive glances in my direction with increasing regularity. He’s a weaselly individual with a quivering, ratlike nose, which he continually wipes with the back of his hand. Finally he spoke. ‘What are you writing?’ He was staring at the open journal on my lap.
‘About my experiences,’ I answered. ‘That’s what I’m thinking of calling it: Experiences.’
‘I hope it is favourable to us?’ He laughed nervously, but continued to study my reactions with sidelong glances.
‘Of course it is. Why should I write anything unfavourable when I’m fighting on your side?’
‘That is true.’ He said it without conviction, perhaps indoctrinated in the idea of no one in the world having anything good to say about the Serbs.
I should be more careful. Although not too many people here speak English – and among those who can, even fewer can read English – I must be careful my journal doesn’t fall into anyone’s hands.
‘You can tell the world about Tudjman and Boban. Not enough people know about them.’
‘I’m not writing this for publication, Stevan. It’s only for me. It’s like a diary. But tell me, what should the world know about those two men?’
‘They have killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs and thrown them out of their own homes. Everyone says how bad we are, but the other side, they are much worse, and no one says anything. Look at what happened at Pakrac and Ogulin. Many Serbs were slaughtered in those places. People should be told about that too.’
He took another of his sneaky looks at me and, grinning broadly to reveal a fine array of blackened, crooked teeth, launched off on a completely different subject, as if the slaughter of his people no longer concerned him. ‘I am going up to the farmhouse.’ And he quickly, almost instantly, put on a tired, satiated air, in exactly the same way that a man will choose a certain necktie in the morning to let the world know how he feels. He wore this look blatantly, proudly, as if he wanted people to clearly understand where he was off to, what he was going to do when he got there, and how it would affect him.
‘Good for you,’ I said. He contemplated the ground at his feet, or possibly his coming exploits in the farmhouse – it was hard to tell – and we lapsed into silence. I closed my journal. I wasn’t comfortable writing in front of him.
There’s a lot of talk every night about this farmhouse. The men talk about it more than they talk about the city they’re besieging. It’s where they keep the women they’ve captured, the young girls and wives of their enemies. Rather than being brought down to the battery or to the camp, they’re kept locked up in a big farmhouse on the edge of the village. They come from distant places, new areas captured by the rampaging Mladic. Some of them are no more than girls, from what I’ve heard, most of them Bosnians and Muslims.
Many of the men go up to the house after they’ve eaten, some before, just as men in England will visit their local for a leisurely pint before or after their Sunday roast. There’s another group that goes up to the farmhouse every night, and sometimes even during the day. They’re the hard-core group. They relish every moment of their visits and afterwards love to recount their adventures in endless detail – half of which I fail to understand – to anyone who’ll listen. There’s no shame to be found there, quite the opposite. They’re mightily pleased of what they’ve done and boast openly of fucking, buggering or being fellated by the wives, mothers, daughters and sisters of their enemy – quite possibly a woman who only recently lived right next door to them.
I suspect some of the men are in the war only because it allows them to visit the farmhouse. If I mentioned the word ‘patriotism’ to them, I think they’d wonder what I was talking about.
Nikola, the one who claims to be a lawyer, wandered up at this point. He addressed Stevan: ‘Is he coming with us?’
Stevan shrugged. He turned to me. ‘Do you want to come to the farmhouse?’
I answered no. ‘I’m tired,’ I explained. Like Nikola, I addressed this remark to Stevan. He’d become a kind of instant go-between.
Nikola laughed, and said in his smarmy way, ‘A man is never too tired for that.’
He was trying to play the part of a man, or how he imagined a man to be, and he wasn’t being too successful, or not in my opinion. It was too obvious he was playing a part. Although he was holding himself like a cowboy in a western, I was only able to see the lawyer with a bumbag around his stomach. I shrugged.
‘They have some new ones up there,’ he said, now addressing me for the first time. ‘They were brought in today. It’s good when they’re new; you know that every man and his dog have not been there already.’
I still refused. At the time, I didn’t bother to ask myself why I refused to go, but I think it was something I wouldn’t be happy to either observe or take part in. Also, I dislike Nikola. But now I think that maybe I should have gone, just for the experience. Everything should be of interest to me here, absolutely everything. That is why I’m here.
Stevan was particularly puzzled by, or suspicious of, my refusal to accompany them to the farmhouse, and asked – much to Nikola’s amusement – if I liked boys. He said they could get me boys if they were more to my taste, and I could see that he was talking about himself. He leant forward, half his face crimson from the flames, his nose twitching in the half-light, and suggested that, because there were no boys, I could use the women like boys. I pushed him away and said no. He frowned at me, then shrugged, feigning indifference.
Nikola said something to Stevan under his breath that I didn’t catch. They both laughed, staring at me and nodding their heads. I asked him what he’d said. ‘Nothing.’ He was grinning. I insisted, and there was a sudden, expectant silence, as if the men around us could sense the possibility of trouble. But Nikola was so pleased with his little joke he repeated it to me anyway. ‘I said that you are more interested in reading books than fucking. That is all.’
I said nothing. There didn’t seem any point.
‘Reading books and writing in your notebook,’ he added. Although I’ve made no effort to hide my notebook from anyone, I was surprised. He saw that. ‘What are you doing – spying on us?’
‘I’m fighting for you, Nikola. How can I be a spy?’
He sneered. ‘I don’t believe you are here to help us. I think it’s because there’s something in it for you.’
‘What’s in it for me?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t worked that out yet.’ And a moment later the two men went off and left me in peace.
Can you be left in peace in a place like this?