Sarajevo Marlboro (9 page)

Armin has been wounded hundreds of times, and yet he only has
one scar. He boasts he has others which you can only see when he takes his clothes off, except he doesn't want to undress. I think he's lying, because I saw him once as he was washing in the yard. He's
intact.

Once I voiced my suspicions, but he just got angry. “Boy Wonder!” he yelled. “We're finished! Because you've betrayed me, and that's unforgivable – you know that Robin never betrayed Batman, don't you?”

Armin sat on the wall and lit a cigarette. He refused to look in my direction for several minutes. Then he asked me, “Do you know what happens when the wolves from Ontario cry?”

I didn't reply, so he asked the question again. I felt awkward. I didn't know what he wanted. How could I? I've never read a comic with crying wolves from Ontario, “Armin,” I said, “I don't know that cartoon.”

He motioned with his hand and sighed, “You're dumb, Boy Wonder,” then he fell silent and just stared at Mount Igman.

The next day he went back to the mountain, climbing up through the green at first until he reached the line and crossed over into the snow. He was going to fight the Serbs who were under the command of the innkeeper with the tattoo of Zagor on his left shoulder. A long time ago Armin promised me that if he ever captured this enemy leader he would peel the skin off his shoulder and give me the tattoo as a present. I was planning to frame the scalp and hang it up on the wall. It would be so much better than any other spoils of war.

“Tell me, Armin,” I asked him once. “How d'you know what kind
of tattoo the innkeeper has on his shoulder when you're in one trench and he's in the other?”

Armin laughed, “Boy Wonder, you're not too swift!”

Then he explained that he and the innkeeper have been locked in combat for over fifteen months. As a result, they know each other better than Flash Gordon and Dr. Zarkov. From a distance they have already studied each other in minute detail.

“You know,” Armin said, “the innkeeper would probably be my best friend if I didn't have to kill him. The Redcoats are people like us, don't forget. Their only mistake was choosing to be Redcoats. Mind you, if it were any other way, life would be very boring, wouldn't it? Instead of DC Comics, say, or Luno's Big Book of Comic Strips, there'd be only blank notebooks in which you could write nonsense or draw love-hearts with Cupid's arrows and silly things like that. You'll understand when you grow up, Harun. Boy, does it piss me off that a fucking Redcoat has a tattoo of Zagor.”

I continued to nod my head while Armin was speaking, because I knew that if I stopped for a moment or, even worse, tried to ask him any questions, like the one about his scars, he'd just snap at me and say, “You're dumb, Boy Wonder,” and refuse to look at me again.

But I know that Armin is lying when he says that he owns all the comic strips featuring Zagor, and that he knows the number of each adventure. Because when I said to him,
“Chico the Seducer,”
he replied, “Four hundred and thirty-seven.” He was wrong, of course, so I ran
home to fetch
Chico the Seducer,
number 239, but when I got back he was nowhere to be seen.

You never really get to know his movements. Most of the time he's in Muče's café, unless he's gone to fetch water for his mother. But then you try to pin him down and he claims he was in the war zone fighting the Redcoats. In fact, I happen to know that he's deeply ashamed to have lied about the scars he doesn't have, and the comics he doesn't possess, and the back issues he doesn't know. I don't say anything, however. Armin is still a fighter, and you should always be grateful to them. I am useful to him in terms of logistics – which is to say, I bring him lots of comics.

Once I gave Armin an unused bullet, and he was really pleased. He put it in his shirt pocket and said, “Boy Wonder, I promise you I'll take out Mitar KalpoÅ¡ with your bullet. I had him in my sights, you know, at least three times, but I wasn't in the mood. Now I'm going to jump out of the trench straight in his line of fire, and as soon as he puts his finger on the trigger, I'll kill him with your bullet. And I'll tell everybody that Robin has once again saved Batman's life. You know what your bullet means, don't you, Boy Wonder? It means that the damn raving Redcoats will never capture Ontario or float down the Miljacka in a steamboat!”

For a month now Armin has not returned from Mount Igman. I'm worried in case something's happened to him. Perhaps he really did jump out of the trench, only to discover that he'd left my bullet in the
pocket of his other shirt. The weather has improved during the last four weeks. Spring has finally arrived, and the snow has melted in the city. The line across Igman is moving upwards. Soon the white will be overrun by the green. I'm worried that Armin will not return before the snow melts on Igman. I have a feeling that if I ever see a completely green mountain, then he will never come back. The trick is in the line – and I know it. If the line disappears, the hundreds of invisible scars and the adventures of Batman and Robin will have meant almost nothing, but certainly no more than back issue 239 of my favorite comic, the one with Chico the Seducer, who only killed a Redcoat by accident.

Ivo T. always was a communist – and he always will be. The year before the war, not long after the various nationalist parties won the elections, he led his wife and children on to the patch of grass in front of his apartment block, made a fire and began to roast a lamb on the spit. We couldn't help watching from our window, but we weren't amused. Ivo T. was dressed in a white shirt and a suit with a red carnation in his buttonhole. As he turned the spit, he made a point of holding his head high like Emperor Franz Josef. It was as though he'd forgotten that nobody celebrates May Day anymore. His wife and children perched on wooden stools, looking equally festive. But you could tell that they didn't really know where to put themselves. Every passerby stared disapprovingly at the family, and a handful even made rude comments.

Ivo T. pretended not to see or hear anything, but when he just couldn't help noticing, he responded with the national sign language of Bosnia – an obscene gesture involving the forearm.

In nineteen sixty-something Ivo T. was chosen as president of the local council. Every day he came to work on his bike so that he wouldn't stand out from the workers. His trouser legs always bore the traces of bicycle clips, and you could always see the imprint of the saddle on his bottom. On Sundays, however, he used to stick his wife and children in the Yugo 1300, and drive slowly up and down Princip Street or around Vitez so that everybody could see them. Of course he only bought the Yugo in order to help the country's economy – unlike some, who bought Mercedes and thus helped the capitalists. But after only a month Ivo T. resigned from his council job. Nobody could understand why, although he claimed it was because he just couldn't deal with those criminals.

When Tito killed a prize bear in the woods near Bugojno, Ivo T. said, “It's a pity for the bear, I guess, but it's only a wild animal after all. As long as that's where it ends.” Some people claimed that Ivo T. was against the state and against self-management, but he replied, “I knew the right path even when Tito broke with Stalin, let alone when it comes to a bear hunt.”

The others bowed their heads and went home without saying a word.

When Tito died Ivo T. locked himself in his room and drank a bottle of gin before dawn. He summoned his wife, Ruža, his son and daughter
and gave them a pep talk along the lines of, “Now the old man has gone, there'll be no more messing around. I expect you all to behave responsibly . . .”

All the party officials stood to attention as the pall-bearers lowered Tito into his grave. Ivo T. also got to his feet. Tears ran down his face as the Internationale was being played.

Ruža, however, was a God-fearing woman. In the run-up to Christmas she always did a bit of dusting, replaced the curtains, went to the hairdresser's, and made sure the children looked neat while her husband looked on grumpily.

He knew her game. Two or three days before Christmas he went up to her and gave her a talking to. “There'll be no Christmas celebrations in this house,” he said. “I have already made my position clear, and I'm not going to be like some people. You know the type – on the one hand he's a communist, but on the other his house looks like Zagreb Cathedral. If you want Christmas, take the kids and go to your mother's or
my
mother's or wherever. Celebrate as much as you like, but leave me out of it.”

Ruža used to go with the children to her mother's one year and to her in-laws' the next. Without fail Ivo T. would appear at the relevant house several days later; it was as though he was just passing. He'd be dressed in his everyday clothes, and he'd sit down, have a drink and a bite, wish a merry Christmas to the family, and then announce, “Socialism guarantees the freedom to worship.”

Ivo T. was friendly with everybody except thieves. Walking through
Vitez, he would never fail to greet his acquaintances politely. He was equally fond of the Germans and the English and the Americans. In spite of capitalism. As a matter of fact, the only people he hated were the Japanese. Nobody knew why. One evening his children were watching a Japanese film on tv and he'd fallen asleep in his chair. (He always sat on the ordinary wooden chair, because he had a bad back and it hurt even more when he stretched out.) He was snoring away when a samurai suddenly yelled out and startled him from his sleep. He began to shout at the tv – it was “the Japanese this” and “the Japanese that.” The children managed to get their father to calm down, but his tirade ended with a rather strange question. “Well, my old Darwin,” Ivo said, “if a man comes from an ape, where does a Japanese come from?” Then he returned to his chair and began to snore again. Later, everybody in Vitez laughed about Ivo and the samurai.

It became fashionable in the workplace to think of yourself as a Yugoslav. But when Ivo T. was asked what he was, he replied, “I must say that I'm a Croat.”

His colleagues were surprised, but he went on, “That's what I was born and I can't change it. If you don't like me as a Croat, why would you like me as a Yugoslav?”

Once again, they lowered their heads and left. That's what the times were like.

When his son was leaving to study in Zagreb, Ivo T. accompanied
him as far as Zenica, embraced him, shoved 100 Deutschmarks into his pocket and said, “The people in Zagreb are just the same as people in Vitez. You have good ones and bad ones. The good ones will like you as long as you don't forget where you come from.”

It's hard to know whether the boy paid any attention to his father or not. He wanted to have a good time. He didn't think about what he was leaving or the life that awaited him in Zagreb. That day a terrible storm broke over Vitez. The sky crashed down. There was talk of a pregnant woman who had been killed by lightning in Kruščica. Some people heard the child cry from inside its dead mother's belly – but after a while it stopped. Others said the child should have been taken out of its mother while it was still alive. As it is they had to bury an unbaptized soul inside a baptized one. Old women later claimed that such a thing always causes bad luck. It was as if somebody had whispered in the good man's ear, and persuaded him to remove his son from any misfortune.

Vitez was not bombed during the early months of the war, but as time went by the Muslims and the Croats began to listen to the firebrands among their leaders. They began to look askance at each other and then to set fire to one another's houses. Each community went its own way – some escaping to Zenica, others from Zenica to neighboring towns. They dug trenches for several weeks and then the chaos began. Wherever you went there was blood and shooting. There was nowhere else to look. They were cramped, and so were we, but everybody
felt more or less comfortable until they had to leave their homes. We battled over each field, over plots of land to which none had given a second thought until then. Bosnia shrank like a scarf washed in boiling water.

Ivo T. walked around Vitez like a shadow of his former self. There was nothing left of him. He'd shrivelled up and withdrawn into himself. When the church was hit by a shell, he stood in front of the doors with tears streaming down his cheeks. We were all upset, but we couldn't understand how it was that he, who'd always been and who always would be a communist, felt even worse about the shelling than the priest did himself.

“Don't cry, Ivo,” I said. “We'll fix it easily.” But he just kept repeating that nothing could be fixed any more.

I thought, “What do you mean, you silly old man? Why can't the church be fixed when the hole's only half a yard by a yard?”

But I didn't say anything. I could see that the poor guy had lost the plot, and I didn't want to say the wrong thing and risk having him break down in front of me.

Except he wasn't finished. “How can we fix it, Rudo,” he asked, “if with my own eyes I can see the sky where my ancestors could see a bell tower?”

Suddenly I began to choke. I embraced Ivo and hid my face in his coat. We must have stood there for ten minutes – two men leaning on four legs. If you'd separated us, I think we'd both have fallen down and been unable to get up again.

An American came from Zagreb bringing a small parcel from Ivo's son. Three boxes of cigarettes, a pound of coffee and two cans. That was all the guy could carry. Ivo T. took a couple of the cigarette boxes and went from door to door giving everyone a packet. He kept the third for himself.