Diary of Interrupted Days Read Free Page A

general, after all, with access to the best shelters. Still, he felt that everything was being destroyed. He had been abroad long enough to start perceiving his homeland as an idea, not a set of particular people and buildings—still it was an idea buried in the foundation of his being. Each building the NATO bombers hit was part of the idea. Every time he heard of another bombing, he felt physically ill. His neck and shoulders turned to stone.
    Boris thought of going back to Belgrade, but he knew he would be drafted immediately. He talked with his mother almost every day on the phone—he always expected to hear bombs exploding in the background, but never did. They had moved to their cottage an hour south of Belgrade for the duration. They had enough food and his father had brought his whole collection of weapons and ammunition with him, even a sniper rifle he obtained through channels. His mother sounded upbeat and he hadno doubts about his father’s mood, although, of course, they never spoke.
    For the first time in years he made a steady stream of phone calls to his old friends in Belgrade, who all talked fast, describing crazy things—how terrific all-night parties were taking place in several of the larger shelters, how people brought drugs with them, and booze, how people had sex and made jokes about the bombing, how everyone had a badge with a target drawn on it. How everyone prayed for their enemies to come on foot, so they could give vent to their frustration.
    In the beginning, the bombing victims were just people, somewhere, just numbers. Then, during the second week, they were people with names, people friends of his friends knew. By the third week, they were colleagues.
    Boris’s mentor died. The old artist was staying with his family in a city that had not been bombed at all. One night, the raptors finally came to destroy a factory on the edge of the town. The artist was three days short of his ninetieth birthday, and during his lifetime had seen both world wars and the Balkan wars. He was almost completely deaf and mostly blind and did not hear the first few explosions. But then they dropped a large one, and a trace of that horrific sound reached what remained of his hearing. Jolted out of his silence, he asked what the noise was. “It’s a bomb, Grandpa!” his granddaughter replied.
    “Not another war,” he said, and died.
    At his funeral the air-raid sirens sounded, and everyone abandoned the coffin except one man, himself old enough not to be afraid of dying.
    Boris knew that his mentor’s name would not be added to the list of victims, he knew that the cynical NATO spokesman would not be apologizing for this death, the way he ironically apologized for other blunders.
    Then came the fourth week, and in the chess of death a move that found Boris on a bad square.
    The border was close now. Miša switched the radio on and fumbled with the dial, checking for news bulletins. When all he could find was music, he relaxed a little bit.
    “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said, “why are you all in black?”
    “I’m going to a funeral. My father died.”
    “From the bombing?”
    “Not directly, no.”
    His father, ever vigilant, had got into the habit of borrowing a horse from a neighbourhood farmer. It was a workhorse, rarely used for riding, and the animal hated having someone on its back—but that’s precisely what had attracted the General to it, his mother said. The owner did not mind lending the mare: he thought that it was the rider who was in danger, not the horse. The General would mount the horse, avoiding its teeth as it tried to bite his leg, and take it for a slow ride among the vineyards on the hill above the village. He would carry his binoculars and his old shotgun, and put on the jacket of his old uniform, claiming that it was the only thing that could protect him from the wind up there, on the hill. The villagers started addressing him as Marshall.
    On a sunny afternoon, the