LITMIR.BIZ

       1

      The bridge was the problem. Because that was where the snipers were waiting for you. And you had to cross because you were on one side and the food was on the other.

      Please God, may they not be waiting today. Please God, may they not get me. Because today my husband is on the front line, and because he’s on the front line, probably only three hundred metres from the bridge, he cannot go for the food while I look after our son. Therefore I have to go, even though the food will only be a bowl of beans and a slice of dry bread. I cannot wait because my son has not eaten for two days and is crying with the pain. Because we have been under siege since August, and now it’s January. And the nights are long and dark and the days are so cold I sometimes think I’m going to die, and the shells have been falling on my dear sweet pretty little town for as long as I can remember. Therefore I have to go for food. But because my husband is on the front line, waiting for the next attack, there is no one to look after my son. So I have to take my precious little Jovan with me. Because unless he eats soon he will die. But in trying to reach the food the two of us might die anyway.

      Therefore, when I reach the bridge and begin to run across it, I will pray that the sniper who killed old man Samir yesterday and little Lejla the day before, is looking the other way, or moving position as the snipers do, or warming his fingers round a mug of hot coffee, or glancing up and downing a slivovic.

      Therefore when I begin to run across the bridge I will hold my little Jovan in my left arm, so that my body will be between him and the sniper. And when I try to make it back across the bridge I will hold Jovan on my right, so that I am again between him and the sniper. Please God, protect me. Please God, may the shells not fall again until I and my little son are safely home.

      Dear God, why did you decree that I should be born a Bosnian? Dear God, why have you allowed the warmongers to tear my country and my people apart? Dear God, why have you decreed that the governments of the world do nothing; that the United Nations should stand back and allow this carnage?

      She made sure the coat was wrapped tightly round the boy, that his gloves were on his hands and the scarf round his head, and pulled on her own coat and boots. Even though it was mid-morning the room was dark – just the glimmer from the makeshift candle on the table. They had lived in the semi-basement since the siege had started and the shells had begun falling. At first, and in the heat of summer, herself and Adin in the double bed and Jovan in his next to them. Now, in the cold, the three of them slept together. When Adin was not on the front line defending the town. Two days at the front and one off – that was the way the men fought now. Not just the soldiers but everyone. Sometimes she woke at night – when, that was, she was able to sleep – and imagined him staring into the black, the wire to the land mines clutched in his hand for the moment the enemy tried to storm the town.

      She opened the door and checked outside. The snow was frozen hard, the sky was a deep grey, and the sound of small-arms fire rattled in the distance, at the head of the valley where the men were positioned. It was the usual pattern – shelling for an hour as the winter night broke into day, a handful of shells in the middle of the few hours of light, then a last barrage as the light left them. Always the snipers in the middle, though, like the tripwires in no man’s land.

      She lifted the boy in her arms, picked up the tin pan and lid, went outside, and closed the door. There was one other person in what had once been a street, scurrying as she herself was already scurrying, scarf wrapped round her head and tin container clutched in her hand. She nodded at the other woman and hurried after her, feet slipping on the ice and the air almost freezing her lungs.

      The boy’s face was already white with cold, and

Скачать книгу