April, this one now, two thousand thirteen. Cold, gloomy, tiresome rain and snow. Rivers flow over and flood. Disaster, catastrophe for the people living by.
As if by symbiosis, that is just how I feel. Some future April will perhaps be sunny and warm, and dry, but I feel I will still be the same. It will always remind me of disaster, not one that came as an act of God, but one that stemmed from men. Every April, my heart and soul will be flooded with sorrow once more.
I have this strange feeling, perhaps it’s a disorder, masochistic, that I welcome the sorrow as a sign that I have not lost my soul yet. And it’s good that it comes. It makes me human. The rest of the year I have to be cheerier, full of enthusiasm. Yes, I have to. I don’t want to get lost in the abysses, I mustn’t, for my children’s sake. I return to April for in it it all began.
In Aprils I have my rituals that I guard and won’t mention to anyone. Up to now they were only mine, of the living. And all those that are no more, they are about them. I go to the neighbourhood where I grew up. I go up to the apartment where I spent some twenty years of my life and I sit down with my old man. We have a beer or two, and then, saying I don’t want to smoke up their home, I go to the window. I light a cigarette and watch the playground in front of the building. For us, the good kids from the neighbourhood, our hair always combed and with anything a sandwich in our hands, this was a training ground for proving our street smarts, kicking the ball around until we fell off our feet, fantasising to no end. Our piece of sacred ground, or better said, asphalt. I keep trying to remember growing up and being young, but to no avail. My gaze hitches upon the windows of people who were killed in the war. I start thinking about death. I’ve had my dose and I go on. I’ve entered the time-machine. The window lived up to my expectations once again.
War is a specific state of understanding death. All those rituals and knowledge passed through the millennia of human history apply in war. I suppose they are meant to prepare and encourage. With the addition of martyrdom that is encouraged as the ideal death for the soldier. Killing the enemy is justified, forgiveness guaranteed, whatever the circumstances. How else could it be, for magnificent Death brings fear in its tow. Where would armies be if they feared a higher power that would judge them for taking another’s life or, God forbid, dying in vain. And when the war is over, and the drums die down, violent death is dethroned by “common” peace-time death that will come for all sooner or later. The fear, however, remains. It’s even tangible. Often the fear of death evolves into a death wish.
What is it that remains, what do I remember and how? I do not stop my thinking about death at people I knew personally, people that were on the same side with me during the war. I think about those I knew personally, but who were on the other side. And those I did not know, those I met under the most tragic circumstances, at their deaths, on my side and the other side. This universality in thinking is the link in my feeling of humanity that comes back to me each April.
When I remember the war, it usually comes back in episodic visualisations. Distorted images in slow motion and vague contours of people. Except when it comes to the wounded writhing in agony or the dead. Their faces are etched in my memory. Clearly and in living colour. I remember my fellow fighters in the throes of death, their bodies mangled, often missing limbs, contorted into unnatural positions that only violent death can form. And yes, faces of people I expressed my sympathies to. I remember them clearly as well. I see those stone faces with absent gazes as if originating from an abysm, and not from eyes.
I also remember the “enemy”, especially one blond young man, a burst of automatic fire shot through his chest, he watches me as he gurgles to his death. As if he wanted me to remember him. Later, I did use to run into people who reminded me of someone else. And as I stretched my brain to remember, the memory would flash in my mind and my body would go numb. I knew where it came from.
The place, the date, the weather that day, it all comes back.
Sounds and scents have left deep inscriptions, deep and resonant, as if they happened just a moment ago. The whistling of bullets and explosions of bombs, I’ve managed to get over, even though I used to hear them at night long after it was all over. The cries of mothers looking for their dead I never shall. Why did I have to hear them?! There are people who go mute with pain, I remember that as a sound, too. As a ringing silence.
The cries and screams calling for the wounded stuck in no man’s land between the fortified lines are the true music of war. No trumpets or triumphant songs.
You get used to the smell of gunpowder, solvent and motor oil early on in the war. Later you become familiar with the smell of a foot blown off by a mine – a combination of burnt flesh, scorched rubber and cloth. The smell of guts mixed with pieces of metal and dirt, the smell of bodies covered by thousands of flies and maggoty in the June sun, I would purge those smells from myself even if it meant never again being able to smell flowers, or food, or tobacco…
I don’t remember the events themselves, in the war my mind constructed numerous scenarios about the dead and their loved ones. I usually wondered what would become of the wife and children left behind, the brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers? How will they learn to live without their loved ones? In the post-war years, my scenarios receded before their life stories. Seeing those people go on with their lives, I sealed the pages of my scenarios.
There’s just one still unravelling in my head. About the family of a man in whose military ID booklet I found a photo of him, his wife and their two daughters. That one will never end. Twenty years later, and I am still imagining them receiving the news that he would never be coming home. In my envisioning the two girls are still small. I embrace them and tell them how sorry I am. Perhaps I’m biblically enlightened. “Love thine enemy,” says the book. “Can I bring them back to life, at least some of them? Can there be no enemies in this shitty world?” say I.
I heard or read somewhere about a Native American tribe that believed the soul of the man whose life you took continued to live on inside of you. Perhaps that is that something that won’t let many go back to “normal”. I remember a friend of mine who committed a double murder. He spent a little time in prison, there were mitigating circumstances because the murder victims had also been armed. I ran into him at a bar one night after he got out of prison. After a while and quite a few rounds the conversation turned to the murders. He told me his side of the story and I asked him how he handled it. He said, “Here’s how. When we leave here, you will go home and get in bed and fall asleep. And I will sit up with the two of them talking until tomorrow morning.”
Amer Delić