LITR 3371.

01

To Those Who Sleep

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When I was little, my father would tell me stories of The War. Mama hated him for that, I think,

though she loved him for everything else. Later in life, halfway through her evening bourbon,

shed always start rasping about how the old man must have poisoned my mind with tales of

death and despair, and Tata would simply laugh and plant a kiss on her forehead. Id always

hoped to be like the two of them, one day.

Looking back on my life, I truthfully dont think that Tata enjoyed telling me those stories after a

time, but how could he refuse? I was always good at putting on those puppy-dog eyes, he told

me, and that pathetic expression always tugged him beside my bed late at night to sing me to

sleep with his rough smokers voice. Hed always made it sound so romantic, war, as if the

Ustae were a storybook dragon while my father and his fellow etniki were shining knights in

armor. It wasnt until later in life that I would learn of the collaborationists - of the true hell that

my father must have lived through after the events of Novi Sad - but even still I would picture the

man as a grizzled knight errant, traveling through the beaten lands to mete out honor on the

corrupt and unjust. It was a pretty picture, even if I knew it was mostly a lie.

My favorite stories had always been - and still were, if I was being honest - the ones with Mama

in them. Heroic tales of the beautiful Charani swept from the terrible clutches of the beast by her

foreign savior. I learned not to ask Mama about the camps after the first time Id questioned her

about it near my twelfth birthday, when shed broken down crying until Tata had come home

from work to console her. That night, he poured himself a glass to match my mothers and

entered into my room with a solemn tone. That night, he told me about the day he had found my

mother.

Almost everyone was crying then, hed said. The VNS soldiers had cried before theyd been

shot, and the etniki rebels had cried before doing the shooting, but not a tear was shed by
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those theyd moved from the camp. Tata had given me nightmares that night, telling me tales of

the decaying bodies still lying in half-dug ditches that the Magyars hadnt bothered properly

burying, of the skeletal figures that came limping from their hovels at the sounds of gunfire

outside, dressed in rags with faded badges on their clothes, none of whom shed any tears of

either fear or joy as they were lifted from their damnation. Most died on the trip back to the rebel

base and, as my father told it, he imagined that it must have been a mercy.

But my mother was different. My mother was crying. My father had found her in a smaller

building, laying almost silently in her cot with tears streaming down her face in darkness of the

unlit room. She was less starved than the others, hed told me, and the emblem on the back of

her patchwork shirt hadnt faded enough to be unrecognizable, still clearly marking her as a

gypsy. The other beds of her cabin were all full of similar inhabitants, though these had no tears

left to cry, and no life left in them to fight as my father had tried to shake them awake. The last

thing hed been able to make out in the room before hed left with my mother slung over his

shoulder was a sentence roughly scratched into the wooden walls of the hovel by the doorway.

Azoknak akik alsanak. To those who sleep.

It was a powerful story and, though my childlike mind was unable to comprehend the weight of

what hed just told me, Id always respected my father even more after that night. It was the first

tale Id been told that would prepare me for the reality of war, and while many claim that I should

have been too young to have heard such a story, Ill always appreciate Tata for telling it. After

that day, I never again had to wonder why my mother would always wear sleeves on her

dresses that reached down to her elbows, or why I would sometimes catch her curled up by

herself in bed, humming a lullaby from a foreign land.

When war came again in my own life, the stories of my youth encouraged me to face it head on.

I felt as though, unlike so many of the other young men and women so eager to take up a rifle
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and defend their homeland, I had no romantic concept of war. That I was ready to face the

hardships of battle and emerge on the other side either unscathed by its horrors, or dead for my

fellow countrymen. But I was still a child. I had no real concept of war.

By the time I was twenty-four, the war had been ongoing for three years. Three long years, and

damn near nothing tangible in my world had changed. When Id first left my home to join the

insurgency, I had either been mocked for my attempts or begged not to leave - and my parents

were firmly in the latter camp. War was no place for a woman, both would tell me, but I had

thought to know better. After I saw the Muslims bomb down a hospital they thought was

abandoned only a few weeks after we had done to same to one of their schoolhouses, after I

heard the radio announce that the JNA had begun gunning down Macedonians and Jews found

within their own ranks, I regretted not heeding the words of my father. War was no place for

women, nor men. War was no place for anyone.

And yet still I refused to return home, to leave the harsh reality of war and retreat back to my

cozy home far to the west. My parents were safe, I told myself, and they were safe because of

me. Both me and my countrymen were here in the east not for glory or righteousness, but so

men like my father would never have to return to their pasts. And I wasnt the only one with

these memories, as it turned out. Mijo, a defected Bosniak national, had a grandfather whod

been killed in Kragujevac, and Durriken, a Slovenian jew, told me that his own parents shared

similar stories to mine, though it was his father whod been freed from Jasenovac. Together,

wed all reminisce in this shared lie, telling ourselves that we truly were the righteous warriors

that we had always imagined our parents to be, and that the blood each of us had spilled must

have been for a just cause. How else were we meant to sleep at night, weapons clutched to our

bellies with radio static blaring in the background?

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On one particularly terrible night, Durriken had awoken from a nightmare. His son was held in

his arms, he told me, his stomach torn open by a bullet fired from the mans own weapon. In his

dream, he said, hed meant it as a mercy, hoped that his son wouldnt have to grow old and live

through war like his tata and deda before him, but all he could remember was the look of pain in

his sons dying eyes.

Durrikens son had been killed two years prior, alongside his wife. Collateral damage, according

to the radio, by fighters on his own side. Id never heard a man howl quite so loudly before that

day. Since then, this nightmare had plagued his dreams. We all cried together.

On this night, though, it was worse than usual, and the noise of war in the background was

drowned out by the mans sobs against my shoulder as he wept. Not only for his son, not only

for his wife, and not for his country, but for himself, left alone. I had no horrors of my own to

compare to his losses, but in that moment, my mind returned to my mother. I remembered the

look of peace that would drown out the horrible lines of pain etched across her face as she laid

solitarily in her bed, and so I began singing. Slowly, the foreign words of my mothers lullaby

returned to my lips as I hummed out the tune, singing softly into my comrades ear as the sound

of his cries grew more subdued in my own. The words had always been morbid, and as a child I

had found them fascinating, but now they simply spoke truth to the world. As he drifted back to

sleep, I planted a kiss against his forehead while I spoke the final words of the song, azoknak

akik alsanak.

Durriken died two weeks later, shot through the forehead by a Muslim sniper. It was so quick, I

was told, that he was already long dead by the point at which the shot could be heard ringing

throughout the hills. That he hadnt felt a thing before he died. That it was painless - a merciful

way to go. I think I mightve loved him. I think I still do.

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I can remember the exact night that I become disillusioned with the war, as though someone

had taken a hammer to my head and finally broken down the wall I had taken such care in

erecting. Durrikens death was five months behind me by this point, and though the loss of such

a close friend still weighed deeply on my mind, there had been no time to think through it and

grieve. I didnt know it at the time, but the war would begin drawing to a close later that year.

Each of us believed that we had seen the worst of it, by that point - that nothing could phase us

by that time in life. We were wrong.

It was a cold Tuesday evening late in February when it happened. The five of us were staked on

the outskirts of a town skirting the border of Bosnia, all sharing a broken down home that, in the

best of times, could barely house a family of three. According to some of our informants, the

civilians of a small village just across the hills had been assisting Srpska nationalists and their

Croat and Bosniak supporters by drip-feeding them supplies and smuggling a few insurgents

across our borders under the guise of trade. I never liked targeting civilians, whether or not our

intentions were hostile, but such a lengthy conflict had ways of making monsters out of even the

best of us. If we were lucky, the information would go nowhere, and every one of us would

huddle back into a jeep and leave the village behind us in a matter of months. Our time there

was miserable, to put it lightly, but hardly the worst thing that wed ever been through. Being so

close to a civilian town that had gone mostly untouched by the wars meant that the nights

lacked the constant orchestra of gunfire and artillery shells, and all of us could sleep easier

without too much worry that our throats would be slit while we dreamed of home.

I was on watch duty while the others slept, sat by the front window of the ramshackle home with

my rifle propped lazily between my knees and a thick blanket draped atop my shoulders.

Outside the hovel, the world was white, a picturesque scene of fluffy snow that covered the

barren grounds and crumbling homes. The scene mightve looked at home on a holiday

postcard or vacation pamphlet, and for a short while I could pretend that I was somewhere else,
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far away from this war and the trouble it brought alongside it. Silently, I pretended that I had

returned home for Christmas. Both of my parents had left the country by this point, having

managed to gain passage westward in the hopes that they might find a more peaceful life in the

British Isles. Theyd urged me to come along with them, to escape these war torn lands, but

once again Id been too stubborn. Id traveled back to speak with them for a short time before

they left. I asked my father if, knowing what he knows today, he would have left his countrymen

in his youth to fight the war on their own. If he would have left my mother to die and starve while

he sailed westward for a safer life across the ocean. He didnt have an answer for that. Theyd

left me a bottle of their favorite bourbon before heading off, but Id already finished every drop.

I usually didnt mind taking the watch - not any more than any other jobs. It was quiet, usually,

and it meant I didnt have to sleep. That I didnt have to dream. But today was different for one

reason or another. The air felt stiff, as if everyone was holding their breath, and something

about the way the bare trees swayed outside in the wind put me on edge. It nearly felt as though

I was already dreaming.

Terror first struck me when I glanced out the window and saw a shifting blip in the distance - a

man, dressed in vibrant blues and greens, was walking towards our hovel. Stumbling, more

accurately, and clutching at his side as he swayed back and forth through the snow. Through

the sight of my rifle, I could see that his coat was stained with blood.

It could have been a trick, it could have been an ambush, but in that moment I had acted on

instinct alone, flying from my seat and out the door of the shack to run towards the mans side.

Was he a Bosnian defector? Did he know something about the nationalists? My mind was

running so fast as I sprinted from the door that it took me until Id reached halfway towards

where Id spotted him to notice that he wasnt there at all.

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He mightve fallen in the snow - it was high enough to conceal a man laying face down - though

as I drew ever nearer, I could feel the hair on my neck prickling and shivering despite the heavy

coat guarding it from the wind. Something was wrong. I could feel it. But I couldnt see it. Not

yet.

When I walked over to where Id seen the man standing, the spot was empty, but I could still

see clear tracks in the snow that simply ended.There were no signs of struggle, no signs of a

fall. It was as though the man had dissolved into the crisp air midway through his walk. Even

now I couldnt tell you why, but my hands were shaking more than violently than they ever had

before, or ever have since. I stepped further forwards, shuffling into the village, only to find it

silent. Empty. All the houses abandoned without any sign that anyone had ever left. I walked in

and out of every house of the small town, each time expecting some Serbian bastard to jump

out of the shadows and gut me standing, but one never came. Every man, woman, and child in

the village had seemingly vanished without a trace, leaving behind all signs of life but none of

death. This was wrong. I knew it. I had to tell the others back at our hut.

And thats when I heard it. Humming.

It was soft at first, like a whisper on the breeze, but slowly it grew in volume as I ran from the

house and out into the snow, looking up and down the street for its source. I could find none.

Though as I stood there, slowly, I could begin to discern the words that this ghostly voice sang

to me.

sz van s peregnek a srgult levelek

Bnatos knnyekkel zokog az szi szl
Hiba srok s hiba szenvedek
Szvem mr j tavaszt nem vr s nem reml

Vrosok pusztulnak, srapnelek zenlnek

s bartom, az emberek gyarlk s hibznak
Szval amg emberek vrbl piros a tarka rt
Csendben imdkozom azoknak, akik alszanak
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My mind had gone empty, at that moment. I ran from the village more quickly than I imagined

my feet could ever carry me. I ran through the snowy hills until my own legs could no longer

support my weight and they toppled beneath me, leaving me to collapse in the snow.

When a scouting party found me a few days later, they told me that it was a miracle that I

survived. Id been found passed out in the snow, frostbite encroaching on my extremities and

insides coiling with hunger and thirst. There was no reason I should have survived, they said,

and yet there I was. I asked why the other members of my convoy hadnt found me first, and

they were surprised to hear that I didnt know. A band of Serbian nationalists had descended

upon the group one evening, slaughtering the villagers and Croats alike, I was told. By their best

estimates, the Serbs had arrived late at night on a cold Tuesday. There had been no survivors.

I moved in with my family in South London a month later, and soon saw the news that the wars

of my home country had finally come to an end. From then on, whenever I heard my elderly

mother humming herself to sleep, I would always match the words of her song.