Diary of Interrupted Days Read Free Page B

General rode uphill sometime after five. The horse returned home alone just before six. While they were gone, a huge formation of bombers from Italy had flown over, going south towards Kosovo. The planes may have scared the horse or some animal had run out of the bushes to startle it. The villagers found the General lying under a pear tree. He was alive, but semiconscious and breathing with difficulty. It took the ambulance an hour and a half to get to him, and almost three hours to drive him to the military hospital in Belgrade—another group of bombers had started attacking the capital in the meantime and the roads had been closed. The General was pronounced dead on arrival. The autopsy showed that a broken rib had punctured his lung and caused internal bleeding.
    Like every other bit of news about the General from the past ten years, Boris had heard this from his mother. Boris and his father had stopped talking to each other in 1989, and there were a few years before that when they hardly talked at all. After Boris had moved to Toronto he’d rarely even thought of his dad, and when he did, it was always as the General. The General who went into politics after retiring. The General whose party was directly responsible for his son’s leaving the country, like tens of thousands of others, all young, educated people, artists, doctors, engineers. The General whose political convictions were more important to him than his only son.
    “This grandpa from my building, he’s been through the big war,” Miša said. “He told me he’d prefer to die than see enemy soldiers on our streets again.”
    “They will never come down from the skies.”
    “I don’t think so, either.” Miša sighed. “That’s frustrating. Or maybe that’s good. Perhaps our dicks are not as long as we think they are.”
    The music on the radio was some Croatian song, recorded before the war.
    “They’re playing that now?” Boris asked.
    “It’s as if nothing ever happened.” Miša paused. “People are trying hard to forget that there was a war at all. As if all of it was just an incident caused by the drunken guests in a Balkan bar. I know some people who were in Bosnia and Croatia—they all claim they shot in the air or they didn’t aim. Who did the killings, then? Maybe they’re not lying, maybe mujahideen came, and mercenaries, such scum.”
    “We wish,” Boris said. “My best friend was in Croatia for just a few weeks. He saw some ugly stuff that our boys did.”
    “What happened to him?”
    “Deserted one night. Then left the country.”
    “He must have seen something he shouldn’t have.”
    Boris didn’t answer.
My best friend. Johnny.
It came so naturally.
    They rode in silence. Half an hour later, they saw the customs sign on the side of the road. There was only one car ahead of them, and they were soon at the booth. The single duty officer nodded at Miša, looked curiously at Boris, and stamped their passports. The same procedure was repeated on the Serbian side, and they were through.
    The General had retired in 1986 in a regular renewal of the commanding cadre. He went gracefully—got his gold watch, his decorations, and his farewell party. Still, it hithim hard. He used to say how he could hardly wait to leave the army so he could go hunting, play chess, read all the history books he had piled in his study over the years that he never had the time for. Boris remembered the large old bookcase full of red tomes behind the pompous writing desk in his father’s study, a place he rarely entered. The classics of Marxism, Tito’s collected works and some leather-bound volumes of the regime’s favourite authors. One whole row was full of books in Russian—the lowest shelf behind locked doors. Those who had showed their support for Stalin went to jail after the country refused to enter the Eastern bloc, so the General was discreet about his love for Russian literature. Even when Boris advanced to the grade level in which