#134 Crimson- Josip Novakovich
Milan is a soldier for the Serbian army during the war in
the Balkans. He is a reluctant participant. He grew up knowing the divide
between the Serbs and the Croats but like many young people he had to be taught
hatred.
“He had heard that Croats had burned his home, and now he
hated them.”
The more powerful Serbian force has the town of Vukovar
surrounded in siege.
“No water flowed through the pipes and most of the sewage
system was empty, so the people had lived like rats, together with rats, and
the rats waited for them to die, so they could eat them.”
Seeing his first close engagement, Milan captures a 55-year
old man and is forced to shoot him point blank. “Facing a tall, boney stranger,
Milan felt neither hatred nor love, but he did not want to shoot him.”
In a drunken guilty fit, he comes across his captain raping
a young woman who he imagines is a girl he once danced with during more
innocent times. He kills his captain and escorts the “saved” woman to a refugee
bus. He is disgusted and distraught at what he has done and what he has seen,
he quits his post and returns to his home town.
“The series of events in Vukovar had changed him; he no
longer feared what would happen if he were caught deserting the Serb army or if
he were apprehended by the Croat police.”
In a twist only war can create, he finds the woman he saved,
she is pregnant from her rape. He convinces her that he is not the evil man she
thinks, and eventually marries her and raises the child as if it is his own…and
as it turns out, it actually might be.
The story, while hard to read, does a good job not
over-doing any of the descriptions. The plaintive truth is graphic enough.
There is a parallel between how the more powerful Serbs justify their violence
with how the rapist justifies his. The stabbing seems like an apt justice, as
the “penetration” permanently wounds but does not kill.
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