Bridge Over the Neretva
This is an excerpt from Django Wylie’s debut novel, Bridge Over the Neretva.
Dragomir
It is at times like this, Dragomir thinks, that the war seems totally un-winnable. Not because the Serbs won’t be able to overcome the Bosniaks militarily – of course they will. But because when they win, the very country they have been fighting for will be lost. So why go on? Because, he guesses, if you didn’t fight, then it would be lost, too. You still had to do your bit — play your part in the eccentric suicide of the country you had loved.
Dragomir had always thought of himself as a pretty moderate guy. Sure, he’d had a passing interest in politics, but he was more interested in football, money, women, and carving out an undemanding, but lucrative, job in the law. But now politics was everything. Everyone was drunk on nationalism; high on vague, expansive ideas that didn’t stand up to any sort of sober scrutiny. But then again, they didn’t need to. No-one, it seemed, thought that much about what they were doing anymore. You just did as you were told, or you simply did as you wanted. So long as you were in a uniform and doing something, no-one asked too many questions.
He looks around at the three soldiers he’s here with on the hill. They’re thugs, mostly. Well, Petar and Zivko are, at least. Unemployed losers. Football hooligans. Lowlife. Then there’s that pimply dickhead Zlatan. He can’t be a day over seventeen. None of them are anything like Dragomir. Before the war, he’d been going places. He’d gone to the University of Belgrade and got the top first in his year. His father had been the Deputy Director of Ideology in the local branch of the Yugoslav Communist Party. Their family had been part of the unspoken elite — the ones that were just a little more equal than everyone else. They had drunk wine, smuggled in from the West, driven imported cars, and had once gone to the see the visiting Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra with some of Tito’s inner circle.
When the war had started, Dragomir had presumed he’d be either exempted from having to get his hands dirty, or be given a cushy position in some field office, looking at plans and nodding at multicoloured charts with a brandy in hand. A strange few months, he had been promised, then things would go back to normal… He rubs his tired eyes and spits an acrid mixture of soil, mucus and rakija into the undergrowth. He still can’t believe that it didn’t work out like that – that things didn’t go the way they should have – and now here he is, sitting in a shallow hole behind some sandbags, waiting. Waiting for a line of Bosniaks, retreating from Srebrenica, to emerge from the woods below, so he can order Petar and Zivko to set up the howitzer to shell them into a gory pulp.
Dragomir focuses his binoculars on the edge of the woods. Still nothing. He’s beginning to think that the tip-off they’d received earlier that morning was wrong. Twelve thousand Bosniaks, he’d been told, were going to march through the valley below. They had been spotted leaving Jaglici yesterday, and were apparently travelling the fifty or so miles to Tuzla in a thin column, following in the tracks of the de-miners up front. Beyond blindly bombarding the marchers with shells, Dragomir is unclear what the plan is. He finds the overall lack of organisation in his unit deeply irritating. He casts his eye over the others. Petar is telling some lewd joke to Zivko who is, in turn, seeing off the last of the rakija. Zlatan has taken his jacket off and is sleeping under the warm July sun. He should be imposing some order on his men, Dragomir thinks. But what’s the point? None of them really want to be here. Even though Petar talks endlessly about eliminating the Muslim disease from Greater Serbia, and Zivko is apt to boast about his mounting bodycount, they would, Dragomir knows, all rather be back home with their wives and kids, drinking beer, eating pljeskavica, and watching Tropical Heat on TV.
“You seen them yet?” Zivko asks. Dragomir says nothing, passing him the binoculars. “Fuck,” Zivko says. “When do we call it a day? We’re out of rakija already.” He tosses the empty bottle into the grass.
“We’ve been ordered to be here till sunset,” Dragomir says. “I guess we’re kind of lucky that we got this job and didn’t end up like the guys in Radmilo’s unit. You heard what happened yesterday?”
“Yeah, their tank hit a mine or some shit,” Zivko says. He sits down and begins picking gristle from his teeth.
“That’s right,” Dragomir says. “I reckon we’re pretty safe up here.” He picks up the binoculars and wipes some flecks of mud from the lenses. These dickheads are so careless, he thinks. So vulgar. A few feet away, Zlatan is cleaning his boots with the point of his knife. Zivko is unsubtly scratching his crotch, while Petar is attempting to play patience with an incomplete pack of cards he must have stolen from Branko’s tent. Dragomir checks his watch. Seven more hours. How can that possibly be right? Above, a few stray clouds are making incursions into the clear, blue sky. Perhaps, Dragomir hopes, they’ll be saved by the rain. Branko has given them permission to return to the camp if there’s rain or high winds. He doesn’t know why — Branko is a bit of a superstitious bastard — but Dragomir is not going to argue.
He lifts the binoculars to his eyes to see if he’s cleaned them. But as he does, he can’t help but notice activity in the valley below. He stands up and focusses the lenses on the edge of the forest. At first he’s certain he’s dreaming. He lowers the binoculars, blinks a few a times and then looks again. Fuck, he thinks. About thirty seconds pass in silence. Dragomir watches a thin trail of Bosniaks materialise from the dark forest a few miles below. He was expecting soldiers, but instead this is an army of emaciated shadows. They look dreadful. Many of them are limping; their clothes are torn and bloody. He watches a handful of them fill up small plastic bottles of water from a dirty stream. They drink thirstily, then pass the bottles along the line. Dragomir remembers some rumours he had heard back at camp that some of Radmilo’s guys had been ordered to poison the water. For some reason, he finds himself hoping it isn’t true. He continues to watch. Seemingly unaware they are in an extremely vulnerable position, some of the Bosniaks have begun to sit on the grass… He has to do something, Dragomir thinks. But somehow he feels like he’s already missed the moment for action. He wants to shut his eyes, or maybe go and join the card game behind him. Because the problem is, the more he watches the Bosniaks, the more uncomfortable he feels about being the one who determines their brittle fate. Rather than looking like the enemy, he thinks, they look more like himself, reflected in a broken mirror. And who is he — a spoilt law student in an ill-fitting uniform — to rain down fire from the skies? He lowers his binoculars, his mind abuzz with argument and counter-argument. What is he doing? His delayed reaction is a dereliction of duty. He should be feeding Zivko the coordinates now. If everyone shirked at the critical moment, the war would never be won. But something about the whole situation seems so fundamentally wrong. What on earth is he waiting for? Hasn’t he spent the last few weeks nervously awaiting some action? He can’t possibly pretend he hasn’t noticed anything in the valley; the others will soon take a look for themselves and then they’ll be some serious explaining to do… Fuck, Dragomir thinks, too often it is a curse to be a reasoning creature when life is never lived in the abstract.
“Enemy sighted,” he says to Petar in a voice he hopes sounds soldierly. “About three hundred meters south-west.”
Petar drops his cards and runs over. He snatches the binoculars off of Dragomir. “Shit,” he says. “Right. Zivko load the gun.”
Zivko stabilises the antique howitzer — some corroded piece of Soviet junk — and begins loading a shell from the small wooden box they dragged up the hill at dawn. It takes him a few attempts to slot it in — the rakija, Dragomir thinks, must have been stronger than it looked.
Dragomir’s job now is to give Zivko the correct line and elevation so he can accurately fire at the group below. They’ve practised this many times before. A quick thinker, Dragomir has a reputation around camp for being able to calculate ranges and angles quickly and precisely. He remembers that back in the autumn of 1991, when the war had still seemed like an outlandish, relatively insignificant sojourn from the general sweep of his life, his team had won the “Long-range Challenge”, successfully hitting all ten of their wooden targets in under ten minutes. Branko had taken them to a brothel in Bijeljina to celebrate.
“Alright,” Dragomir says, correcting the crack in his voice with a sharp cough. “Ready?”
*****
They used to say that Serbian shells were guided by God. And in the moment, Dragomir had thought that he’d done his best to thwart Him. Because when he had seen them coming out of the forest he had known he couldn’t kill them. Not like that. It wasn’t right. So he’d listened to the pleading voice of his conscience and given Zivko incorrect data. And he’d thought that would be enough — that he’d done his bit. He’d imagined the shells dropping ten or so metres away from the Bosniaks; their tired outlines making for the safety of the trees. But it hadn’t been like that at all. No, not at all…
Dragomir straightens his tie in the mirror and checks his phone. There’s a message from Bogdan and a reminder for his meeting with Jakov that night. That loser. He’s got a proposal for him — something he’s sure will firm up support among the electorate for his presidential bid — that is, if Jakov bites. But of course he will, Dragomir thinks, pouring himself a drink from the decanter he keeps in his desk drawer, people tend to do whatever he wants them to do. After all, he’s very persuasive. It’s a product of his illimitable cynicism.
Drink in hand, he stands by the window of his office. Outside the rain beats softly on the time-worn glass. Dragomir watches a family drift past Restoran Kod Zoke into the supermarket; the grey water of the Drina a mere blur in the background. How was he meant to know? It’s the question he returns to whenever he has a minute alone. It’s why he surrounds himself with people like Bogdan; why he’s always trying to get on TV or under the noses of journalists. Because being an image — being a voice —stops the mental interrogation. The worst thing was that he thought he’d done enough, standing on that hill, all those years ago. The plan had seemed so simple: fire a few warning shots, get them to flee. Job done. Why had no-one told him the shells were full of poison gas?
He leaves the window and goes over to the bookcase. It’s mostly full of various histories of Višegrad, but there’s also Nationality and the Dissolution of Yugoslavia, The Criminal Code of Bosnia-Herzegovina, The Tripartite System in BiH: A Critique of Shared Presidency…. Dragomir runs his finger along the spines. He stops as he reaches a thin red volume. A little dust drops to the floor as he slides it out. He can’t have opened it since his university days, Dragomir thinks. He’s not even sure how it’s ended up here. There’s a page with its corner turned down. He opens it and reads:
“But for what end, then, has this world been formed?” said Candide.
“To plague us to death,” answered Martin.
Pretty much on the money, Dragomir thinks.
“Do you believe,” said Candide, “that men have always massacred each other as they do to-day, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?”
“Do you believe,” said Martin, “that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?”
Dragomir closes the book. When it all came down to it, wasn’t that the truth? That ugliness is our essence; that only one truth was eternal: the weak would be overcome by the strong. Watching those Bosniaks choke as they attempted to flee the rust-coloured cloud that settled over the valley had dispelled Dragomir of any utopian notions. Men would always act awfully. And the world would always reward those willing to be a little more awful than the rest. Vae victis. You just had to treat life like the brutal game it was and take everything you could, presuming others were doing the same. Otherwise the sheer hideousness of history would drive you mad.
There’s a knock at the door. It’ll be his secretary with the evening papers, Dragomir thinks. He finishes his drink and wonders where the opinion polls will have placed him today.
