You'll notice the song that the old woman sings looks suspiciously like a romantic language, instead of a Slavic one. I looked up Bosnian lullabies, found this one, listened to it, liked it, used it. But I really don't think it's written in Bosnian. I know it's Jewish, so there's a chance it's hebrew?
Chapter 1/Part 2 of 2
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Beside him, the older couple were talking softly between themselves, their heads inclined, secrets being tossed from mouth to mouth. Verbal resuscitation. Watching them, Nikola suddenly felt desire punch him in the gut with invisible brass knuckles. He wished Ana was there. He wished he could clutch her hand – grasp it like an anchor in reality – and talk to her. It was so easy to see shadows here. Writhing, twisting, erotic glimpses of the future and the past and everything in between. On the walls, crouching in the corners, these shadows danced strange and graceful pirouettes. Waltzing. Whispering words that infected his ears with Ana's gasps and groans.
That poisoned his vision with rutted grave-sites. Little wounds with dirt lacing the edges like coagulating blood.
“Ana,” he whispered.
Dmitry turned. “What?”
“It's cold.”
Smiling, a taut gash under his nose, Dmitry nodded and looked outside. “We won't have to wait long. It'll be warm soon.”
Another bomb. This time, the department store shuddered – shivering in the harsh ashfall – and everyone was silent. Nikola's ears rang. Powdered Sheetrock rained from the ceiling in a gauzy mist; like some kind of wedding train.
Breathing was tight and restrained. As if oxygen was a rare commodity now.
They were coming.
They were coming closer.
In answer to the whimpering of a child elsewhere in the building – sobs of terror stolen from swollen chests – the old woman beside him began to sing. Nothing more than a whisper. Nothing more than a prayer.
“Durme durme izhiko de Madre. Durme durme sin ansia y dolor.”
Her voice stumbled to the floor, soft notes dropping like coins, like tinkling bullet shells. Nikola closed his eyes and absorbed the words, letting the music seep into his pores like sunlight. Passing through his skin by diffusion. Osmosis.
Sleep, sleep Mother's little boy. Sleep free from worry and pain.
“Sienti joya palavrikas de tu Madre. Las palavras di Shema Yisrael,” she hissed, choking out the music. Gasping on the song. The whimpering had stopped. Nikola's hands were shaking. He closed his eyes tighter and willed himself out of the department store. Out of this littered war zone. This urban dystopia caused by governmental Pandora's boxes.
Listen, my joy, to your Mother's words. The words of The "Shema Yisrael.”
The woman looked up at the ceiling – with a naked skeleton of piping – and sang even softer, so that Nikola could hardly hear her words,“Durme durme izhiko de Madre. Con ermozura – ”
There was a high-pitched thrumming sound and half of the department store exploded, shredding the old woman's song, ripping screams out of hoarse throats. Concrete and shattered bricks and people were broken and tossed across the store and fire blossomed superheated tongues. Nikola grunted, felt himself lifted off the ground and rammed into the opposite wall. His breath was snapped from his lungs violently and the world seemed to fracture in front of him, dissolving into a trillion spderweb cracks.
People screamed.
His ears were pounding. His head felt like splintered wood.
And all he could think about was his gun.
Where the hell was it?
As dust descended on the building like lacey veils, Nikola tried to scramble to his feet. But his legs were liquid. Once, twice, he tried to push himself up. They were here, they were here, they were here!
Ana!
He swayed, his eyes painted with shards of glass, and managed to stumble upright and lean against the wall. Swearing, he blinked and stared at the ground, his vision jittering in and out of focus, sharpening and blurring.
Everything was bleeding together.
His gun! Where was his –
A hand wrapped around his ankle in an iron-fingered grip and yanked it backwards. Nikola grunted and fell forward, his chin ramming against a hunched slab of concrete and his vision was suddenly corrupted by stars. Little breaths of light puncturing the velvet twilight drifting across him. Screams were carried through distant sounding conduits and reached his ears like music from a phonograph. People were crying. Sobs flew around the room along with bullets being fired from outside the gutted department store.
He desperately wanted to sleep now.
Close his eyes and rest his throbbing head on rubble mattresses.
A petrified hand was still clasped around his ankle. And someone was wheezing next to his ear like a heart attack victim hooked up to a respirator.
The craving to sleep was a paralysis. Slipping up his legs, oozing into his veins like welcome formaldehyde. Somewhere – somewhere far away – the urge to find his gun and run as far away as he could from Sarajevo as possible, to die somewhere else. To die drowning in cleanly pressed bedsheets instead of strafed with hornets of shrapnel and bullets like the dull tools of a surgeon.
Ana.
Get up Nikki.
I just want to close my eyes for a bit. Just a minute or two. Durme, durme. So tired.
Not ready.
You always say that.
Really.
Durme.
Get up, Nik.
His chin was on fire. And so was his arm. Opening his eyes he saw threads of blood tracing down his left arm, pooling in his hand like a crimson oil spill. There was no pain. The gouged out pockmarks – shrapnel scalpels – were merely blossoms to him.
Beautiful blossoms.
Smell them. Like copper and iron. They smell like Ana on the kitchen floor with a piano-key colored neck.
Get up, Nik. You're not ready.
Your gun! Get the gun, you little bastard!
Nikola turned his head to the side and saw Dmitry lying tangled up in a broken clothes rack like kite strings tangled in a tree. His hand was wrapped around Nikola's ankled and the AK-47 was trapped under a boulder impaled by rebar next to his head. His head. Shattered. Dmitry's features were barely recognizable under the veil of blood painted liberally across his face which was raw and naked – the cheek bone exposed like driven snow. He wheezed. Little strings of spit lacing his mouth.
“Told you,” he hissed.
And the wheezing stopped.
And the grip was like steel.
Grunting, Nikola sat up and frantically began prying Dmitry's fingers – slippery with blood and sweat – from his ankle. They were stiff and relinquished their grip reluctantly, screaming with the rust of death and rigor mortis. Nikola glanced over at Dmitry's face – a razor-edged smile ripped across his skull – and lifted his AK-47 from under the concrete, ducking as a smaller explosion rippled into the department store.
Ashes swirled in front of him. Ashes and freckles of plaster clinging to his skin like fresh snow.
He hoped the older boy was warm wherever he was. He imagined death would be like a thick wool blanket draped across tired shoulders and smothering agitated breath. A dark and introspective feeling. A place removed from the soliloquies of a machine gun and detonations like spinal taps.
He stumbled to his feet.
Serbian soldiers were sprinting toward the department store, yelling softly with hands pressed against helmets and guns clenched in fists. Run. He had to run. There was no way in hell he was going to be able to blow his way out of this situation. The other men with guns scattered throughout the store were already scrambling, clawing at the rubble piles, screaming for escape.
Behind the soldiers, there were tanks.
Hunched and groveling titans. Penitent in their destruction. Humble in the way they scooped brick and mortar out of building faces and shattered skulls with deep-throated roars.
A man in a heavy overcoat bellowed at Nikola, “Run, you little bastard. Don't just stand there, get the – ”
Staccato gunshots. The man in the heavy overcoat died screaming, his gun jerking upwards, choking out rounds.
Nikola stared.
And then he ran.
Sobbing suddenly – but feeling completely devoid of emotion – he stumbled over the rubble and the corpses and towards the opposite side of the department store. He felt like he was running through waist-deep mud. He felt like he was running with the old woman singing lullabies and Dmitry and the man in the heavy overcoat clinging to his arms, hugging his legs. He knew it had been coming. A mile away, he saw this happening. Like some kind of prisoner, he had been internally etching tally marks for every hour that passed before the Serbian battalion found them.
Twenty hours.
Tally marks like knife-wounds.
And still he cried. His tears blurring his vision as he tripped and fell to his knees – choking – and pushed himself back up again, tripping, lunging. Toward the door. The shattered sliding doors slumped on their hinges.
The Serbs!
Those God-awful whores! Reapers harvesting the revolutionaries. Cutting them down with rusted scythes and steel fists and sadistic smiles. Killing Ana. Killing her a trillion times over. Every scream he heard tasted like the smoke-corrupted kitchen in Ravno. Tasted like his sister on the floor. As naked and as raw as a granite statue.
He clenched his teeth and pushed himself through the doors and into the streets.
He would kill them.
Every one.
He would smile as he painted their blood against city walls with masterful brush strokes. An avant garde kind of art. Pasting life – life that coagulated and turned a dusty brown – against pockmarked concrete like graffiti.
But not yet.
Running. Now he was running.
Sweat drained down his face and into his mouth and made cocktails with the blood on his chin. The shouts behind him were absorbed by the looming and meditating structural corpses of Sarajevo, whose bodies had been gutted and whose windows were bleeding mouths.
His breath came in piston explosions.
And ash stuck to his face.
And in the distance: thump, thump, thump.
.
