Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) by William T. Vollmann Read Free Book Online

hissed overhead, rather close, and suddenly Mirjana’s white top went dark at the armpits. Enko laughed at her.
    The American journalist went to get stories from Dragica.
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    Dizzy with cigarette smoke, their hearts racing faster and faster, they flirted, did deals and listened for the shells. Sometimes one or two ofthem withdrew from the window, as if doing that could save them. More and more he admired Vesna, who gave them this place and comforted those who could not distract themselves. In her presence the glare often departed from Enko’s eyes, in much the same way that the offices at the television station slowly darkened whenever the electricity failed.
    She touched the poet lightly on the shoulder; he smiled in hope.
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    The next day after interviewing blue-faced Gypsy women who lived alongside their excrement in a cellar insulated with garbage, they sped again down Sniper Alley and into the garage of the Holiday Inn to meet a statistician of deaths, then back nearly to the frontline, where nobody shot at them, probably because it was lunchtime.— I don’t want you hanging around here more than a minute! Enko shouted. This place makes me nervous.— Sweating, the American took in sunlight, weedy grass, three men talking on the sidewalk in front of a building of black-scorched punched-out windows ringed by concertina wire. One of the men agreed to be interviewed. No one in his family had yet been killed. He couldn’t understand the Chetniks, he said. And his former neighbors, them he couldn’t understand.— All right, said Enko, now let’s get the fuck out of here.
    The American was in the back seat today, to take notes better. Enko was driving. He kept whipping his uncanny eyes left and right. Amir sat beside him, loosely gripping the leather strap of his sky-aimed M48, which appeared useless as far as the American could tell. As they rushed across a pedestrian bridge at a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour, a blue police car nearly slammed into them, screechingly stopped literally three inches away, and sped back the way it had come. Cursing, Enko reaccelerated, past a scorched building into a very dangerous open place where the street was spattered with blackish glass.
    Now the American began to imagine that he would die today; a shell or a bullet would find him; in the mountains all around them, snipers were waiting for someone, which is to say anyone, so today he would serve. He felt certain of this but knew his certainty to be meaningless, so he kept it to himself. This lost journalist, hoping only to learn what was true—for as you know, he believed without being able to say why that ifthis truth, whatever it was, could be communicated by him with sufficient eloquence (and not cut too much by his editor and the advertising director), then he would have accomplished something against war or at least for people (however wanly shone this something)—felt very afraid at times, but not afraid of his fear; for when that went away it went away; he had not yet understood that it was hollowing him out almost like an amphetamine addiction; he was not addicted to war and never came to like it, but the procedure of maintaining his calm in regard, for example, to the shrapnel-shard which had entered the wall two inches above his head just before he was about to sit up from his sleeping-place on the floor of the radio-television station resembled swallowing a pill; he could do it today, tomorrow and for however many unknown days or weeks he might now remain in Sarajevo (on the day after his arrival, the Serbs had shot down the UN plane, so the airport was closed, and he did not know when or by which method he would leave); needless to say, if he lived he would remain in the city for a finite, even relatively minute number of days, while Vesna, Enko and the others would be pinned down here until the end; he could calm himself for each and all of those days—but all the time,