Under Pressure E-Book

Faruk Sehic

• Herausgeber: Istros Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 225

Beschreibung

With this collection of brutal and heart-wrenching stories, the Bosnian writer Faruk Šehić secured his reputation as one of the greatest writers to emerge from the region. A war veteran and a poet, Faruk Šehić combines beauty and horror to seduce and surprise the reader.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

UNDER PRESSURE

In the beginning

A HIERARCHY OF THINGS

THE PURSUIT OF WARMTH

DARK UND DARK

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE : It’s complicated

The Author

The Translator

Acknowledgements

UNDER PRESSURE

FARUK ŠEHIĆ

Translated from the Bosnian by Mirza Purić

First published in 2019 by

Istros Books

London, United Kingdom www.istrosbooks.com

Copyright © Faruk Šehić, 2019

Published originally as Pod pritiskom, 2004 , this book contains additional material

The right of Faruk Šehić, to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Translation © Mirza Purić , 2019

Illustrations and cover art: Aleksandra Nina Knežević

Typesetting: Davor Pukljak, www.frontispis.hr

ISBNPrint: 978-1-912545-02-5

MOBI: 978-1-912545-03-2ePub: 978-1-912545-04-9

This publication is made possible by the goodwill and generosity of a number of readers across the globe, who gave support through Kickstarter.

In the beginning

In the beginning was Eden, whence we were expelled.

We watched the clouds pile up above the hills below which the Una flowed into our town. At first they were light in colour, then they took on the muddy hue of dirty snow. The air was electric, as it always is before a summer torrent. We didn’t like rain because it meant the end of bathing for the day, and it had to be hellishly hot the day after for us to muster up the courage to dip in again. Bathing in the river was the main summer ritual in our town. Life existed only for the sake of bathing. The calendar existed because of summer and water. The town smelt of river, of riverine greenery, of fish. Duck feathers were in the air, fish scales scattered on the riverbank. Smoke rose from barbecues in every corner, crates of beer were cooling in the water. On the other bank, on the roof of a house in progress, the wind outspread the tri-colour with the red star, and the towels tied below it to bring happiness and well-being to the house and its occupants.

When a cormorant appeared on Mallard Isle, somebody tried to stone him away. His feathers were greasy black. He submerged and emerged swallowing fish. The current took him far down the river from the Wooden Bridge, where swimmers tried to drive him away by shouting.

I dived into the river till I could dive no more. The moment I’d emerge onto the bank, which we’d cemented for more convenient walking, I’d climb onto the platform again, leap up as high as I could, bow to the river, straighten my body and delve in with all my might towards the murky blue bottom. It’s peaceful and quiet down there, and soothingly cold. The fish would scatter before me every which way. I’d dive straight into a shoal of nase and the odd chub.

Everyone dived, in order to make the most of the day. Some wouldn’t come out of the water at all, they splashed about in the shallows like walruses letting the stream take them to the waterfall which catapulted them to the Wooden Bridge, some hundred metres from our beach on the Quai.

The clouds are now dark and menacing. Peak voltage in the air. Heavy drops fall hard. Bathing ceases, everyone rushes out of the water, only a few bathers are still swimming. Rain picks up pace, the drops are larger and colder. Thin trees dance in the wind. The raindrops weigh down on their crowns, like when an umbrella is being closed. It’s roaring, and bolts of lightning rend the sky like in the Bible. One should find a lee, wait for the downpour to abate and go home. The surface of the river is obscured by the liquid curtain. It is as if the rain decided never to stop.

A HIERARCHY OF THINGS

Under Pressure

1.

They’ve brought us to the frontline. Mud and fog everywhere. I can barely see the man in front of me. We almost hold onto each other’s belts lest we get lost. We pass between burning houses. The file trudges on alongside rickety fences. The mud sticks to our boots, stretches like dough. Lines seen for the first time are the best. Everything is new, unusual and hairy as fuck. Especially when you take charge of a position at night, and the next day, in daylight, you realise you’re sitting on the tip of a nail.

Charred beams are falling off roofs, sizzling in the mud. We trudge up a big slope. The grass is slimy with fog. Whenever someone falls, he brings the file to a halt and, as a matter of course, curses a blue streak at the motherland and the president. The very thought that we would sleep out in the open flares up my haemorrhoids. The guide, a military policeman, brings us up to the top of the hump. Emir and I take a shallow trench in which we find: a mattress and a quilt, mud-smeared, and a few fags, smoked down to the filter, nervously stuck into the soil.

‘Alright, lads! Freezin’, innit?’ a voice reaches us from the right-hand side.

‘Come ’ere and we’ll talk,’ replies Emir lying on the mattress.

A silhouette approaches from behind.

Hops into the trench.

‘I’m from the third battalion,’ he tells us as we shake hands.‘Got a fag?’

I open a cigarette case full of Gales.

‘Ain’t they gonna see us if we smoke?’ asks Emir.

‘Nah. They’re far from ’ere, and the fog’s thick.’

Emir and I both light up, as if on command.

‘Now then, what’s the lie of the land?’ I ask. ‘Is it ’airy?

‘They ploughed the hill with shells earlier today. A fighter from the second company ’ad ’is cheek blown off by shrapnel. On Metla, a hump twice the size of ours, they ’ave a couple of ZiS anti-tank guns. They can shoot us like clay pigeons,’ Third Bat-Boyo recounts slowly.

‘So, survivors will eat with golden spoons, just like the president promised,’ heckles Emir.

‘Ain’t as bad as it looks,’ Third Bat-Boyo comforts him. ‘Gotta die someday any road’.

Fear creeps into me like mould. It’s shrapnel shave day tomorrow.

* * *

‘Your life line is broken in two places. You’ll be wounded twice, once severely,’ a Gipsy woman told me on one occasion. Dževada tossed the beans, read them, concluded:

‘A journey abroad is in your future, and glad tidings from afar.’

She’d tell that to everyone, since we were surrounded from all sides, and we wanted to escape the siege, that is, to travel abroad. “Glad tidings from afar,” that would usually mean a girlfriend who happened to be outside the noose when the siege started, or relatives who lived in Germany and sent money.

I’ve laid down a hierarchy of things:

war

alcohol

poetry

love

war again

Favourite ditty: Bed, you wonderful device, sleeping in you feels so nice.

Stupidest quote: War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it, Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Favourite colour: Blue, all shades of.

Favourite book: Plexus by Henry Miller.

Favourite beverage: Home-distilled rakia.

Favourite weapon: Hungarian Kalashnikov, ser. no. SV­3059.

Favourite dish: A bottle of rakia and a packet of fags.

Favourite quote: To become immortal, and then die, Jean-Pierre Melville.

Unfulfilled wish: For shrapnel to scar my face, so I look like a badass when I walk into a bar.

Then I fell asleep under the muddy quilt.

2.

‘Fiver says Steelio will make it across the field.’

‘Does it count if ’e’s wounded, or does ’e ’ave to be unscathed?’

‘As long as ’e makes it to that white ’ouse.’

Steelio, thus nicknamed on account of his studded heavy metal leather bracelet, is lying behind an openwork concrete fence. He’s covered his head with his hands. Fine concrete dust is settling on his hair. He’s made it exactly halfway to cover. Bullets from an M-84 machinegun hit the concrete posts, whizz through the gaps, stick into the ground. Steely gets up, takes a running start and is brought down by a burst. The gamblers are sitting underneath a quince tree deep in the lee of a four-storey house.

‘Steely, you alive?’

‘Alive my arse, ’e’s not movin’, ’e’s not even groanin’.’

‘Well it’s ’is own bloody fault, nobody made ’im dash for it in daylight, coulda waited for nightfall,’ the third observer gets a word in.

Steelio gets up again, moves his stumpy legs with all his might. It looks like he’s running on the spot, but then he finally takes off from his starting position. His mullet wafts in the wind. The M-84 is doing its thing, but Steelio finishes like Ben Johnson.

‘Go on, give us the fiver.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Well, did ’e make it or what?’

‘’E did, yeah.’

‘Fair and square?’

‘Fair and square, yeah.’

‘Absolutely romantic?’

‘Absolutely romantic.’

Steelio, leaning on the cold wall of the house, takes broken cigarettes out of his pocket. With his shaky fingers he puts half a cigarette in his mouth and lights up. Fixes his hair. Flicks dust and soil off his fatigues. Blood returns to his face. Night falls like a trump card.

3.

Zgemba is flicking bits of human brain off the filo pie with his fingernail. He’s tearing pieces off with his right hand, dipping them into salt and putting them in his mouth. With his left he’s noshing on cottage cheese, from a white plastic bag splattered with a mixture of blood and brains. His mug is sooty from cartridge gas. In his lap he has a 7.62 mm light machinegun. Five minutes ago this trench was occupied by the autonomist rebels. A still warm corpse is hanging over the breastwork. A burst blew half of his skull off. I turn him on his back. From the inside pocket of his army green jacket I take out his wallet. I look at a passport-size photograph of him. He had a receding hairline. Large, melancholy eyes. With the sharp edge of the photograph I floss out bits of apple from between my teeth.

* * *

In the middle of the operation Deba lit a fire behind one corner of a house to dry his socks. He had left his rifle leaning against the wall at the other end of the house. The autonomists counterattacked. They caught Deba alive and unarmed. Tied his hands behind his back with steel wire and shot him behind the shed.

* * *

That evening, after we were relieved, we went to a kafana. We drank at the expense of the Fifth Corps, meaning for nothing. Zgemba chucked blue diazepams into a pitcher of rakia. We lapped it up from large tumblers. The landlord brought meze – pastirma and cheese – on the house. He had a good-natured mug. He seemed a seasoned host and caterer. The waitress, a Romanian, complained to him that we were drinking for nothing. He reassured her. Her teeth protruded from under her lips, with large spaces in between like on a rake. She said she used to date a bloke from our brigade, whom they used to call Pekar. After a few litres of rakia we started trashing the place. We shot the mirror and the shelves lined with bottles above the bar. Muffled by the noise, a turbo folk number was cheeping from the stereo. I tried to hit a fly swatter that was hanging from a nail in the wainscoting. In the beer garden we scattered the plastic chairs and tables. We butt-stroked a few locals who spoke up against our actions. We disarmed three policemen, lined them up in front of a hairdressing salon. The landlord drove us in his Lada to the schoolhouse where we were stationed, ten kilometres from the kafana. It started pouring outside. The wipers were sliding across the windscreen like pressure gauge pointers. Nothing else of note happened that evening.

From the Haiku Diary

I got drunk and fell asleep on the wooden stall where Jagoda displayed her groceries, in front of the Austro-Hungarian residential building in which I lived.

I was wearing light shorts and a T-shirt.

Mother saw me from the toilet window.

They brought me in holding me by the arms.

Washed my face over the tub.

I felt like a foreign object within a foreign object.

I looked like a weary robot.

* * *

My hands were shaking as I drank coffee.

Opposite the house.

At pizzeria Amfora.

It was completely normal that my hands were shaking.

Common alcohol tremors.

The coffee slid down my throat.

Rinsed the smell of last night’s beer and cognac.

It was day six of the war.

For the first time in my life I was a refugee.

* * *

In the toilet of the Café West I took off my Levi’s and sold them to the owner for a hundred million dinars.

The one million note had Nikola Tesla on it.

The five hundred thousand one had Josip Broz Tito.

Beer soon ran out.

One beer cost half a million.

We drank whisky.

The barman poured it from a five-litre bottle.

We didn’t notice when night fell.

Outside, cold water was pouring from a crude drinking fountain.

Soaking the hot asphalt.

The smell of linden blossom.

Honey in the air.

That’s all I remember.

* * *

For a morning that gives us the illusion of a fresh start…

Arrow-like rays of sunshine came in through the window

of the room above the Café Hajduk.

It was pleasant inside.

Warmth caught on the tips of my toes.

I put on fresh white boxers.

I took some notes and coins out of my jacket pockets.

I opened the window and reached out.

A fresh breeze blew into my face.

And that was no illusion.

I counted the marks.

The morning was made for that.

* * *

21 April 1992 (Tuesday), at 18:15, war started in my town.

In the garden of Café Casablanca I was drinking Sarajevsko beer.

I was wearing the latest model of Adidas trainers.

A pair of Levi’s.

A down jacket.

I hid at my uncle’s some thirty metres from the kafana.

He gave me a .357 Magnum and sixty rounds.

Which I put in my trouser pockets.

Some bullets had hollow points.

Those were the dum-dum bullets.

Shells and projectiles of various calibres were the soundtrack of the first day of war.

I saw a shooting star crash down across a piece of sky between the roofs of two

houses.

I made a wish.

For the war to end.

And to make up with my girlfriend.

* * *

’Ow much money ’ave you got?

Ten marks.

I’ve got five.

We can get pissed as newts.

* * *

We’re drinking beer from the bottle.

The floor is made of marble.

It radiates cold.

It’s sultry outside.

Nobody’s wearing a watch.

Because time is utterly pointless.

* * *

It’s wonderful being a refugee.

Means you’re a fifteenth-class citizen.

And nobody knows you.

You can take a piss in the middle of the street.

And go on your way.

The passers-by will say: ‘What an oik, a proper savage!’

‘Why didn’t they kill the lot of you?’

‘Why didn’t you fight?’

‘Cowards!’

‘Cunts!’

‘Have you no balls?’

Only sometimes the 155 mm howitzer shells whizzing across the sky remind them that there is no such thing as deep rear in this war.

* * *

A packet of Gales is 17 marks.

Partners are 20.

HBs cost 25.

Skopsko beer is 10 marks.

Ćevapi meatballs 20.

A sack of flour 1000 marks.

A kilo of coffee 330.

We’re surrounded from all sides.

But, there’s a substitute for everything.

Quince leaf can be smoked and costs zero marks.

Roasted rye coffee is a mark a kilo.

A bottle of reeky rakia is 10 marks.

Ćevapi are a luxury anyway.

Maize bread is tasty and cheap.

We’re still surrounded from all sides.

* * *

At six in the morning my mother plucked dewy pigweed in the nearby dales.

She brought the harvest home in her raised apron.

For dinner we had blanched pigweed with garlic, pigweed soup and pigweed salad.

I’m full of iron.

As strong as Popeye the Sailor.

* * *

I loll about on a grey humanitarian aid sponge mattress.

Ants are marching up the wall in wide columns.

I’m popping 10-milligram diazepams.

Sleeping twenty hours at a time.

In my room I practise walking with crutches.

My wounded foot still hurts.

I’m reading T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

In the guest room Greta and Nađa are playing solitaire.

Mum is fiddling about with our wood-burning stove.

Dad is away on the frontline.

Behind our refugee house Mum planted onions, peppers, tomatoes.

We’re waiting for the garden to produce produce.

In front of our doorstep, Humpy Horsie is happily barking.

The sun is at its zenith.

* * *

From the last dugout to the left they wired us that Osman Jakušović had been KIA.

A sniper hit him in the forehead, by the hairline.

It was impossible to reach the farthest dugout on Padež hill.

That night they brought him down on a stretcher.

He woke up from cardiac arrest.

He mumbled netherwords.

Our hair stood on end as we listened to the dead man talking.

They took him to the rear.

He died in hospital after three days.

I never got to know him well.

I don’t remember his face.

He was a tall, muscular lad from the village of Stijena.

* * *

10 May 1992 (Friday)

Nothing has happened to me today.

* * *

The machinegun barks like a dog.

I’ve plucked a shirtful of cherries.

Bullets whizz above incandescent roofs.

They say a sniper’s been at it from the Old Citadel.

Here and there, 60 and 82 mm mortars operate.

From time to time a tank shoots a shell.

A rocket launcher lets out a volley.

I shudder if something explodes nearby.

Shudders creep up the spine.

Palms sweat.

I’m talking about normal things.

Like clouds, cherries or the river Una.

* * *

I have decided to write sparsely.

End of war not in sight.

Mon. – drunk.

Tue. – drunk.

Wed. – ditto.

Thu. – 0.

To Eternity

1.

The plan was quite simple: We would stretch out and form a firing line. The nine of us. The distance between each two fighters 5–10 metres. Frontal assault from the Standard Operating Procedures. Baldie will fire a rocket from his shoulder-fired Yugoslav Army Zolja launcher. That’s our artillery prep. We will rise up from the grass. Start shooting and shouting the Takbir as we dash for their trenches. Whoever survives, survives.

Now we lie about and smoke in the safety of our own trenches. We’re wearing our helmets, and our ammunition vests are stocked with thirty-round magazines. Baldie is slinging his Zolja over his back. Our mighty artillery. Faćo is the only one of us who has a rifle with a wooden stock. He says it’s his lucky rifle. The trenchies are offering us cigarettes and coffee, eyes ablink with happiness because they’re not participating in the operation. Everything for the commandos. Small talk, nobody mentions what is to come. As if we were going on a picnic, not a trench raid.

October wind musters out veteran beech and hornbeam leaves. As they fall, they brush leaf against leaf, rustling like Indian silk. The pines are indestructible. Their dark green needles comb the wind. We wait for the battalion commander to give the off via a Motorola. Night is in force. We’re in the forest, where our strange firing line in the shape of a horseshoe is formed. Below the forest runs an asphalt road. Further down is a great big hollow, as dark as King Kong’s gullet. Three hundred metres across the hollow our line continues. So we’re bulging into their line. An un-fuck-with-able salient exposed to guns of all calibres.

Baldie motions us to move. Hafura and I go on a recce, just in case, although midnight blue is the colour-in-chief. We head out of the forest. We walk like camouflaged ghosts, and sneak up to a stretch of stunted undergrowth. If somebody opens up on us, we’re fucked because we’re between the lines. We can only move by ear. We hear indistinct human speech. We hold our breath. Some kind of tapping sound is coming from their trenches. Dull thuds. As if they’re digging in. Now? What the fuck? Baldie approaches with the rest of the detail. We take up positions as planned and start to crawl. Golo brdo. Has there ever been a stupider name for a hump than Barren Hill? We close up to the spot. We can’t see their trenches. It seems they are just below the brow of the fell, on the last slope. Baldie gets up, telescopes the Zolja out. He takes aim, eyeballs it. The rocket flies above the hill and on to Zanzibar. He must’ve hit a barn or some such strategically significant facility. Doesn’t matter, it’s just a psychological trick anyway. Explosions stoke fear, and fear makes you see things, your eyes pop out and gleam white, like those of an ox about to be slaughtered.

We dash, we shoot, we shout.

Metres seem like kilometres in a marathon race.

Time stretches like the rubber strips on a catapult.

Tracers fly every which way.

Enemy fire slows us down.

We just lie on the ground, without any cover.

That’s it. Golo brdo. A dying range.

Hit the deck, graze the grass.

‘Baldie, me gun’s jammed, come over ’ere!’ yells Faćo.

Baldie kicks his gun clear. Faćo puts the rifle’s wooden stock in front of his face to shield his forehead.

‘Fuckin’ ’ell, it’s a tough one!’ I hear Hafura.

‘Tits up, this. Pull back!’ bellows Baldie.

No time to talk. We’re rolling downhill towards our line. We’re shielded from the bullets as we’re just below the shoulder of the hill. Hand grenades explode in the place we were a second ago. The blasts ring out like in a well. We reach the forest. None killed, none wounded. The recruit hangs his head, stares at the ground. His pale complexion lends him the appearance of a zombie. His aquiline nose, hanging from his face like an upside down butcher’s hook, turns him into a walking caricature. He bends over at the waist as he walks, as if to measure his insecurity with strides. To have a raw recruit in your unit is to be blighted by bad luck. It’s incredible how death sticks to them. At times I was convinced I could make out the sigil of doom on their faces.

‘All the king’s ’orses couldn’t take this fuckin’ ’ill,’ Hafura says.

‘Yep, it’s a tough one, fuck.’

‘Night raids are a lottery,’ Merva makes himself heard.

‘Everything’s a lottery: breakin’ the lines, holdin’ the lines, goin’ about in mufti on leave, you can catch death wherever.’

‘Nasty fuckin’ business, this,’ Baldie speaks up.

‘To top it off, me gun keeps jamming’, complains Faćo.

Baldie winks and smiles. We descend to the asphalt road.

‘Right lads, see ya, then,’ the guard from the dugout far left takes his leave of us.

We move in a group. We footslog like tin robots. We’re going back two hundred metres towards our rear. When we get there, the house we’re quartered in emerges from the murk. Merva and I take first watch. The others go to bed. We’re standing in front of the door looking at the green in front of the house. To our right gapes a large hollow. Our positions are some half a kilometre up the mountain. For all intents and purposes, we’re a picket. The dark thickens, like when a train suddenly flies into a tunnel.

‘Tomorrow, I mean in the mornin’, we’ll be attackin’ again, it seems.’

‘Gettin’ fucked is what we’ll be doin’!’

‘They’ve dug in down to the centre of the Earth, can’t scratch ’em,’ Merva moans to himself.

In the distance, a drunk is shooting tracers into the sky. I piss on the corner of the house. Live to fight another day. Me wanger.

2.

Same thing again. Only this time we’re attacking by day. What was the sky like? Was it sunny? I don’t remember. The uniform has a uniform unisex smell. The grass is wet and grey-green like the walls of a public lavatory. It is perfectly quiet those few minutes before the attack. The sounds of nature, too, die down. Or the brain doesn’t register them, focused as it is on one thing only: staying alive.

My body is like a sweaty clenched fist. The firing of the Zolja. Some shooting and shouting of Takbirs. We’ve cracked their line with unexpected ease. Hopped into their empty trenches. A twitch crumples up my face. Expanding bullets are popping like popcorn. Redžo Begić is kneeling on my right. Stalks of straw jut out from under an army blanket. We rummage through some army bags we find there. The owner of the one I’ve got is called Duško Banjac. His name is written in pencil on a piece of paper from a graph pad. We stuff cardboard packets of ammo into our pockets. A jet of thick blood spurts from Redžo’s mouth. He gurgles. His face assumes the hue of lye. At first I thought the bullet had gone through his mouth. We get him out of the trench and further, some ten metres below it, to cover. His death took only a few seconds. We didn’t even have time to bandage him. The bullet went through his chest from above. Ripped up his heart. We covered him with a shelter-half – when you see a dead man you’re reminded of your own mortality.

The recruit retches and chucks up slimy morsels of undigested food. We leave him with the casualty to wait for casevac to come from the rear and pick up the body. Fighters from the adjacent brigade have broken enemy lines on the right flank and burst into some houses level with Golo brdo. We’re making our way through short stalks of un-harvested maize. A shell lands between Hafura and Husin. Both go airborne, together with mown off maize stalks. Husin is wounded in the left shin, a wound worth three or four months of leave. Hafura is blast-injured. Baldie radios in that we have two wounded and one dead.

There is no worse feeling than having to press on with the opera­tion after a situation like this. Sickness and fear reach superhuman proportions.

We come across a body folded over the breastwork like a sack of flour. He’s wearing former Yugoslav People’s Army olive green coveralls. He is 30–35, has a long blond moustache and a new battle harness, which now has no bearing on his appearance. Blood is trickling down from his nostrils, as if he were a minor character killed in the first minutes of a cheap karate film. His wide open eyes stare at the rutted ground.

Thirty metres further on, we discover another corpse. This one is barely 19. He’s lying on his back. His underpants are around his knees. With dignity or without, the man is dead. No one flies off into the sky. The earth attracts bodies and lead.

* * *

An hour later, Pađen and I are prone behind a long berm. We’re controlling a hundred-metre stretch of the meadow. Shells stick into the soil in front of and behind us. I feel one is about to splash onto my back any moment now. Their artillery covers every inch of the ground. I wish I were a mole now. Chickenly panic creeps into me. I wish I could slough off my body, become ethereal. Rid myself of flesh, blood and reason. Become a thin translucent zero.

In fear dwelleth God.

I don’t pray to him, as the war has rendered his existence pointless. He is now most certainly in another galaxy. Snivelling in safety and solitude. Missing not a hair off his head. He’s stacked himself up a breastwork of metal planets. Repeating his creation experiment, because solitude is nasty and he wants to socialise. He needs some new creation: Manotaurs. He’s sick of humans. He has failed. Appalled, he has given up on the Earthlings. Shabby artist, that lad. Still, he did invent evil. If he ever existed.