SERBS
It is cold. We wait for the Serbs.
We wait for Serbs, and when the Serbs come we will kill them
all, what else is there to do? The last lot, those who surrendered, we sat them
in a circle behind the hotel and we beat them with sticks and then we killed
them. A boy was weeping, but a boy becomes a man.
Once, when things were even wilder, we talked about taking
prisoners, but prisoners eat food, prisoners need guards, and prisoners can
turn. Maybe now there is a way to take prisoners, but Johan says, "For
why, Max? For what we do that?" He remembers the women, our women,
singing, their heads bowed. Johan does not need to eat for he lives on hate.
This began a year ago, or it begins tomorrow. Nobody knows.
The horses are all dead, no-one tends the fields. They make bread from bones
and dust and it tastes like shit. We will continue until everyone has found
something, and everything is lost. It is what men do. There does not have to be
a reason.
The Serbs they fuck their own children. And the men, they fuck
each other. They are barbarians, they do not understand love or have a God.
They do not wash and their women are pigs.
Maybe one day it will finish. I don't know. I don't see how
it finishes, not while there are Serbs, rapists, shit-eaters, scavengers. Why
should we stop?
I write this Malinka, even though you will never read it. If
this should end, if I should live, I will never show you this, show you what a
man is really like. Could you make love to a man who has killed a boy? Make
love, whisper in the dark to a man who used a spade to open up a child's head,
a crying child's head?
Can you believe I was Professor of Music? Do you remember
our last day? I told you, "Malinka, tomorrow will be your last lesson,"
but you played so beautifully by then you were already teaching me.
A Professor of music! Will I ever be so again? Will this
stop? Will I be old one day? If I survive I will live to be one hundred and
ten, and I will wear yellow shorts and show my disgusting, wrinkled brown old
legs and you will laugh at me and love me still, my little chicken, barely
ninety-eight and still making music.
But that is if I survive. I have died many times already,
the professor is dead, for sure, but because we wait for the Serbs, because I
must do again what men keep doing, I think of you all the time. We do not know
when the moment comes. A thought can begin anywhere, Malinka, even at the
moment of death.
475 Words
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