I stare down at the city from my hiding place. Going round in my head are the words, ‘If you can see the hills, the hills can see you.’ I’m told it’s how they think down there, those citizens of Sarajevo. It’s drummed into the heads of schoolchildren and office and factory workers like a lesson in road safety. ‘If you can see the hills, the hills can see you’ is a warning against snipers.
It works both ways, of course – or that is what I suppose: a good view of the city means a good view of the hills or the Grbavica apartment blocks across the river. There could well be a sniper in position, watching, waiting for my muzzle flash. In a book I read before coming out here, it stated that the enemy will have an idea where a sniper’s shot came from to within twenty or thirty degrees and one hundred yards. So firing that first shot is a little like waving a flag and shouting ‘I’m here, I’m over here’.
Before the UN became involved, there was much less likelihood of anyone shooting back at us. There was usually just the one enemy, probably a civilian, so as long as you hit your target, they weren’t going to retaliate. But snipers are becoming more numerous in the city now, and certainly there are enough for me to know that I can’t afford to be careless.
I now understand why we receive 500 Deutsche Marks for each victim we kill. There’s the danger of enemy snipers, yes, but claiming a victim is also not as easy as I thought it would be. On some occasions it’s particularly hard. What’s strange is that there’s no system for proving a kill: they simply take our word for it. Such trust, in these surroundings, in this chaos and with these people, is absurd. It seems out of place, especially when there’s so much room for error. Mordo, the man who used to shoot at his brother and sister-in-law in the city, told me it’s been calculated that, in one week, over nine hundred people can be hit by our snipers, but it’s usually only a little over a hundred of those who are declared killed. One in nine doesn’t seem a high success rate, until you consider the challenging circumstances. There are the easy ones, of course, the suicidal ones, those who, with pig-headed obstinacy, amble across the road or down the street as if they were strolling along Oxford Street on a Sunday afternoon. They at least allow me to scratch another notch on my rifle butt. I can thank them for that. I can now feel the notches against my cheek when I raise my rifle, and the number is reassuring. The marks on the rifle butt show I’ve left my mark on the city, and it’s not yet the end of May.
Most days I kill.
I look at the statement, which I wrote down with scarcely a moment’s thought, and I’m stunned. ‘Most days I kill.’ That ‘I’ is me, Milan Zorec, school janitor, would-be writer, son of Pavle and Betty Zorec, British citizen. I wrote that. And if it’s true – which it is – then the fact that I kill on most days means I’ve become a mass killer – no, not murderer, killer. There’s a difference. I kill, I don’t murder. I simply do whatever I do on a large scale. These kills, my victims, the people behind the notches on my rifle butt, are scarcely known to me, but I do sometimes make an attempt to imagine their lives so that I can feel I know them. I want to know them, it feels like it should be part of my task. To be involved with these people, to take an interest in their lives, is the least I can do. It’s important if I want to be a writer. You can’t avoid people if you write books, that’s the truth of it. All novels are about people, so I can’t suddenly stop taking an interest in them, however much I might want to at this moment in my life.
The only changes in my daily routine are the locations I choose, and the weather. I like the fact that every morning I choose where I go to work. Now that the days are warmer, I like to leave the dirty, dusty apartments and head up into the hills. Often I sit amongst the trees and write this journal, smoke cigarettes, or simply stare into space and think. I may not bother to shoot at all. It’s like a holiday, a spring or summer holiday. Sometimes I lie on the grass, my eyes closed, basking in the warmth of the sun on my face and feeling the pulse of the earth beneath my back. For the briefest of moments, I can almost believe that life is good, perhaps the best I’ve known. It can be a real effort at such times to find the motivation to get up and go back to shooting people.
I find myself less keen to write about my victims now, to even think about them or their lives. Having always literally been distant to me, they have now become distant to me figuratively. I’m removed from them. I look at them through my sights, but they don’t come any closer. They’re magnified by the scope, but still remain distant. I’m forced to keep a tally of the number of kills, so that I can later claim my 500 Deutsche Marks (paid directly into my bank account in London), but I now notice that I have to make a note of each victim immediately it happens, otherwise, at the end of the day, I find myself thinking, ‘Was it three I killed today, or two, or maybe four?’ It’s sometimes almost impossible to remember, they blur together so.
People’s lives do blur together when you play God: they become too small and insignificant to bother about. I’m aware of this tremendous, God-like power I possess. Real power, more than a headmaster, a CEO of an international corporation or even a publisher will ever possess, more than I have ever known before. With an almost imperceptible movement of my finger, so tiny, so insignificant that even God might miss it, I can choose to snuff out someone’s life – or not. The power of life and death. Possibly it is no different to how a publisher feels about the would-be authors that pester him every day. ‘Was it twenty manuscripts I rejected today, or fifteen, or maybe thirty?’ Neither of us feels any guilt, I’m guessing. For both publisher and sniper, it’s a job, routine, the only people who may get a little upset are the rejected author and the wounded citizen. Or the wounded author and the rejected citizen.
I re-read a letter I’d received from my mother. She, too, has become distant, as if I’m looking at her through the wrong end of my rifle scope: she’s decreased in size and importance. It’s not even as if I miss her. And the letter, her letter, bored me, that’s the truth of it. It was inconsequential, as if she wanted to avoid saying anything that might cause a reaction. She’s been living with Dad too long, and maybe she thinks I’m no different to him. That would be something. I almost threw the letter away, but told myself not to. If I want to be a writer, I should study it. I should be able to copy her style. It’s all grist to the mill, or whatever the expression is. And what is grist, a grain or something? I miss my dictionary at times, most days in fact. I miss books, full stop. I imagine wandering down into the city in front of me, down to the main library to spend time in its reference section, or amongst the novels and biographies. The library’s gone up in flames, so there seems little point in such idle speculation.