The Third Day

The first four pages of my unpublished novel.

“In every adult there lurks a child— an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole.” Carl Jung

Vlad was lying in the rubble of a bombed-out building amidst chunks of concrete and twisted steel. He wasn't trying to blend into the rubble so much as to become part of the rubble. His rifle jutted out in front of him hopefully looking like nothing more than an errant piece of pipe. The surrounding buildings looked like tattered paper, their facades ripped off, rooms with furniture still inside, beds overturned, pictures shattered, clothes strewn about exposed to the elements, burned from fire and mildewed from the rain. They looked like ruined doll houses, their lives laid bare, their secrets exposed to the city for all to see. Jigsaw pieces of broken lives waiting to be put back together again. Blocks of concrete with steel sticking out of them twisted into abstract sculptures of war. Bricks and powdered concrete poured into the streets like frozen rivers of destruction. Rusted and burnt-out cars sticking out of the streets like rusted teeth pushing through the asphalt, crenelated parapets of the fortress city. Children would play among the ruins, war became their playground, a game among the ruins, nightmares acted out. Everything was covered in dust, all shades of gray, black and white. War bleeds the colour out of life.

The battlefields were no longer in the country, extending across fields, stitching together the wounds of the earth. They had breached the walls of the city, amorphous, like a virus absorbing neighborhoods or receding at the hint of any resistance, civilization encroached upon. Vlad’s face was caked in dust, his lips parched and cracked. "Pfft," he spat out some concrete dust as soundlessly as he could. He lowered his head back to the sights of the Mauser. If someone spotted him up here, they'd send a patrol to flush him out. He had visions of an armed militia bursting through the door to the roof machine guns blazing as he scrambled across the rubble like a spider trying to escape an attacker until his body gave out to the assault of bullets and fell dead, the crimson of his blood pooling on the gray-white powdered plaster before soaking in and being absorbed away until it became nothing more than a memory, a dark blotch, part of the lifeless colour of war, part of its DNA. Even worse, he could imagine someone on the street below simply aiming and firing a rocket launcher, toppling what was left of the ravaged building and he would be swallowed in the rubble, another grave monument to the war. But he was beyond caring, he was beyond life and death, he was beyond good and evil, he was beyond right or wrong, he knew this was right.

The sky was starting to lighten to a robin’s eggshell blue. The streets were still and empty at this time of day. He could hear the first twittering’s of the morning birds. The sound of the birds were the last remnants of when life had been normal. Sarajevo is a beautiful city of ancient traditions, culture and history. It’s built on the same plan as many other European cities, the modern glass and steel buildings, a cell at the city’s center, a zygote awaiting the birth of something new. It’s surrounded by Medieval buildings, balconies lined with plants, and maybe a house with a plaque on it that says some historical personage resided there a few hundred years ago. Along with that history came rivalries that were long submerged and simmered for generations, and when the lid was thrown off, those rivalries were exposed and expressed in a perverse way, war.

We were a generation born of war. So, maybe this shouldn’t have been so surprising. All our fathers had been in the military, the older ones in World War Two. They carried that martial philosophy into their everyday lives. Their heads were filled with romantic notions of war, heroism and valor. They believed in good wars that needed to be fought. They found comfort and even security in the conformity and knowing there was an orderliness to life, and that the conformity and orderliness stopped the chaos. They brought these martial ideals with them and remade the world in that image with new housing complexes in which there were only two or three models to choose from, and you could easily wander into the wrong house because they all looked alike. Food became uniform as well when fast food conquered the world and you could buy a hamburger that tasted the same even if you bought it in Sarajevo, Amsterdam, London or even California. In school there were thinly disguised drills, but we knew they were in case of nuclear attacks. Classes were in the German model from kindergarten to the upper forms. The martial sentiment was reinforced by television, war movies where a couple of minor characters were “killed” but the heroes never were. Even the comedies were set in the war. It was in the morning papers; it was on the news programmes while our fathers extolled what “good little soldiers” we were while buying us toy guns and we mindlessly played army. Even Vlad’s interest in shooting was borne of war. After the World War Yugoslavia started up shooting clubs across the country and set up all kinds of competitions, tournaments and exhibitions until shooting was a national pastime. Publicly it was to help restore national pride, but its unstated purpose was to have a generation of young men ready to fight who already knew how to use a rifle. Our inheritance was always going to be war.

Vlad learned early the toll of war. When he was young there was a guy in town, his name was Milos, he’d been in the war. He was different from all the other men in Vlad’s town. He was thin, wiry, had long hair and a beard and dressed in well-worn clothes. He didn’t work, and he never seemed to eat or drink. He was always around when Vlad was out of school and running the neighborhood. He sat on a chair outside on his front porch. Milos was considered crazy among the townspeople. Vlad remembered his parents frequently telling him not to hang around Milos; his father explained that Milos was shell-shocked because of the war. Vlad didn’t remember how he became friends with Milos, he just remembered always talking with him, maybe it was just two souls who saw the same innocence in each other. Milos would tell Vlad his war stories, stories their fathers, brothers and uncles would never tell them. He told Vlad, “there’s always someone like me that’s there at the beginning of a war and at the end of the war to tell the stories. I was in the war Vlad, it’s easy to kill when you’re young. It’s easy to convince young men to kill, just pick a group and tell them that’s the enemy, that they’re the devil. But when you get older you see how precious life is and how the dead could have had fulfilled lives, and you can’t understand how somebody can take that away from anyone else.” Milos told Vlad horror stories of bodies stacked like cordwood, seeing friends torn apart by exploding shells, comrades shot and in a brief moment of realization, he could see it in his friends’ eyes that they knew they had just been killed. It wasn’t like the movies, heroes and glorious triumphs.

“War exacts its toll on the innocents Vlad; I was innocent and look at me now.” Tears ran down his cheeks. To Milos the war was real, something he experienced, to Vlad the war was nothing more than black and white pictures in a textbook, Milos added colour to those images. “It’s inconceivable that old men can send their children off to war. The killing has to stop; the killing has to stop.” It was the anguished cry of youth that had seen too much, and not the zombie-like acceptance of our fathers who had not forgotten those horrors but suppressed them until they flowered in a new war.

Other times what Milos said did sound like they were just crazy ramblings. His face became red with some fever that burned from the inside out, when that happened it scared me, like seeing a drunken adult for the first time and you don’t understand what’s going on. Milos would talk fast almost on the edge of incoherence, or maybe it was madness like everyone said.

“Who was the first soldier?!” He raved one time. He knew I couldn’t answer, no one could. “They need an enemy, anyone of us can be the enemy!”

“Who Milos, who?”

“I don’t know…the politicians, they need an enemy to divide us, and they’re like a hydra! Do you know what a hydra is?!”

“Yeah,” Vlad said, trying not to show Milos he was scared, “it’s a mythical creature, a snake with a lot of heads.”

“It’s not mythical! And if you cut off one of its heads it grows back!” He sat back in his chair, like he was worn out, tired, the fire broke in his mind, some demon purged, and he was again the angelman, my friend. “Who will be the last warrior?” He mumbled barely audible, defeated. Everybody thought Milos was crazy. But Vlad thought Milos was just trying to rid himself of the memories, and what he had said weren’t crazy ramblings, they made sense now.

Vlad and Milos talked for about a year, and then one day he was gone, Milos wasn’t on his chair in front of his house. Vlad later learned that Milos had killed himself. Vlad thought the war finally got him, one of its last victims, twenty-five years after it had ended. After that Vlad could never go past Millos’ house without thinking about him. To Vlad it had become a war memorial.

‘The killing has to stop; the killing has to stop.’ Echoed in Vlad’s ears ever since then.

…To be continued

The Third Day is a novel of approximately 110,000 words. It is the mature expression of my writing that started with The Lion Communique (a couple of the stories which have been published on my Substack, In Between the Lines. Each week I will serialize The Third Day two excerpts per week and due to its nature will be behind a paywall. I’ve lowered the rates for the monthly plan of only $5.00 a month or $60 for the year! I hope you’ll subscribe and follow The Third Day; I think you’ll find an amazing novel In Between the Lines.

*The picture accompanying this is AI generated by Ahmad Nurohim, the story is all me.