Getting propped up for action ahead.
My own bloody work to be done. The one I hoped I was relieved from long ago. The one I'm best suited at, despite all my hopes.
A half abandoned farm in the middle of nowhere. Corsican mountains like my homeland ones.
Local thugs asleep or talking softly in their own language I can barely get some words.
Me awake all of a sudden, heart throbbing, all I had forgotten haunting me from my past time.
All I had saved my current self from.
For twenty or so years.
Feel icy cold inside. Feel my unescapable misdeeds of long gone past time revamped all at once.
Say emotional roller coaster.
Say topsy turvy all in a day.
I might have foreseen this coming, I didn't want it to happen to me.
I've seen people driven nuts for this, still gettin'round like walking deads, still dangerous, still no future inside, their eyes dark empty sockets only filled by black dispair.
Cold inside.
Cold outside.
Dark night, almost no stars, no moon.
Back then.
Now.
Me, age 13. Big, strong. Mixed blood gypsy. Dark skin. Amazing blue eyes. Muslim. Wrong attitudes.
Grampa Zulfikar badly aged, back from Italy. His jewish mistress had seduced him. Then she disposed of his heart. Potbellied. Too many rakija bottles along his path in this life.
Me growing up with ill temper. Some hoodlum friends. Most of them serbians.
Me exceptionally smart at school though. No typical young misfit at all.
ANCIENT GREEK, PHILOSOPHY - MY OWN TURF.
Daydreamer.
Xenophon's Anabasis always in my pocket.
Looking at myself as a young Tiberius Mauriucius gaining experience on the battlefields.
All of my friends had older brothers who had served under general Mladic or had gone with the Tigers.
We gathered some old rifles, some grenades, ammos. Water and bread.
We started our own war on the mountains around our Drina, we furthered into Turkish lands.
We killed some people at long distance, we preyed on solitary sheep to eat.
We slept in natural pits.
Radovan was the eldest, he owned a long distance rifle. A sniper's one, he said he had stolen it in his parent's barn where it had been hidden by his brother Goran - now longtime shot to death-
Radovan was interesting, by the way. He came from a dynasty of proud shepherds of the mountains. His grandpa a guzlar, Vlatko his name. A poet.
When drunk, Radovan boasted his brother had been shot but not killed, a new name, a new identity somewhere in Zemun or near Novi Sad (places and stories changing every time).
According to him, Radovan's brother was someone in a serbian secret service right now.
One day a group of Turks returned fire on us, Radovan was caught in his shoulder. He passed me his sniper rifle as an ancient noble would have done with his sword.
We barely escaped. They were twenty or more. They had horses.
We were five.
Three horsemen still haunting us, the other on foot stayed exhausted.
I took the long rifle.
I shot the first horseman down at the second shot.
Then the other two. Single shot at each one,
Two days later Radovan's wound became infected.
We were wandering never exactly knowing where we were.
We had no maps (the one we had went lost while crossing a river).
We kept hiding and wandering in the woods.
Hungry.
Three more days, three more nights.
Early morning wake up.
Radovan cold. Bad smell of infection exhaling from his cold nostrils. Dead. A corpse.
We prayed for him, orthodox prayers. I knew them, I knew that prayer from the funerals. I joined them.
We ditched his body in a deep furrow, covered with earth and tree branches.
Dragan cut two thick twigs, two smaller ones, he planted the cross on our friend's grave.
Dragan never spoke. I remember he had sliced to death a rival Turk with his knife back in Visegrad.
We wandered.
Three more days.
Three more nights.
Freezing wind of the Balkans.
Hungry. Thirsty,
Ammos almost over.
Then that night came.
Nobody of us could be a sentinel.
Too tired.
Sleeping.
Me no dreams, blank sleep.
Don't imagine the others.
All in a glimpse. Some unusual noise woke me partially up. Some broken branch.
I thought of a boar, I still remember.
Then shuffling, feet.
Then stomping, big heavy duty army boots all around us.
Six, seven guns pointed at us.
Oh my... I muttered.
"That smell. You filthy assassins," pure american english.
A deep voice came from behind. "Where is Radovan?"
Serbian.
We didn't answer, the shock, I believe.
Dragan talked this time. "He died three days ago."
He couldn't finish his words.
The serbian guy came to hime, sliced his throat in a simple long gesture of his arm. Like a dancer with a knife.
"Goran, don't."
Another american voice, but it was too late.
They asked for our documents, Goran the interpreter, but I could get what they said,
They made us kneel down.
"Holy Mary" said one of them.
They called our names from the documents.
One at a time.
I saw them kneel down, my friends.
I saw them shoot with a muzzled handgun. The Americans,
Goran the secret agent had obtained his ration of blood by his knife already.
I saw them fall down not saying a word, not uttering a last prayer,
Then it came to my name.
A hoarse voice said not this animal.
Like an order.
"Chief wants him alive. This bloody idiot has relatives."
"My God, he's thirteen," someone else commented.
I thought of grandpa Zulfikar, not a big shot for sure he was, nervously chuckling all at once,
They used plastic strings to tie my wrists.
The raspy voice sniffed at me.
"Boy, this smells like a beast," he said.
I knew why. I'm gypsy.
A different smell.
A different skin.
Not like the Turks, they have their own smell, Nikos Kazantakis once wrote it.
Not like the Christians,
Half men, half beasts they consider us.
That night I started thinking of me as a legend still alive from millennia.
A Centaur.
